Dr Greg Bahnsen - Van Til's Presupp Apologetic: Philosophical Considerations, Part 2 (Part 4)

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. Let me summarize what we did in the first hour in case that all just kind of passed by you very quickly. What I've done is I've looked at modern analytical philosophy, Wittgenstein in particular, and pointed out that it would show us that definitions and standards are internal to a way of life, to a worldview. The one's epistemological justification will be internally determined, that is, determined internally by his outlook on life. That all systems have indubitable points, presuppositions, and they form a system of thought that I'm calling one's worldview. Now, from the history of philosophy, we noted that there are standard worldviews which cannot profitably argue with one another just because the worldview determines what amounts to a good argument, and they differ on what amounts to a good argument. And then we looked at the modern analytic synthetic distinction debate, and I've drawn some conclusions from it. That all people grant revisionary immunity to some of their beliefs, call them their presupposition, that this cannot be settled by empiricism or by definition of terms, that people have a web of belief, and that in terms of that web, they accept and reject other propositions. So that knowledge is basically theoretical in nature, not observational in nature. That claims are not tested one by one. That when a person who believes that Apollo is a God and the gods are immortal has a falsifying experience brought to him, it's his whole system that's being tested, not just one of the propositions. And the reason for that is you can never tell which proposition he'll give up, if he's going to give up. And that science, I said at the very end of our time together. Science, then, is not categorically different than metaphysics, because speculation and observation are involved in every one of our knowledge transactions. Now, what I would like to do in this next hour, having shown that there is such a thing, even if you will, from a philosophical viewpoint, as worldviews which determine a person's starting point, method and conclusion, I'd like to point out that the worldview that modern man is using, has been using since the Enlightenment. And that worldview, I think, goes back even further than that. I would agree with Dr. Mantilla, finally ends up in the garden at the fall of man. But that form, the new dress of that worldview since the Enlightenment has led to a real crisis in the Philosophy of science and logic. Since science and logic are of course, the big guns in epistemology, one uses scientific evidence, empirical evidence, and the laws of logic reasoning to prove his point that this crisis in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of logic is giving us a wonderful evangelistic opportunity for any of you that I can call to graduate work in philosophy as Christian presuppositionalists to point out that there is a way out of the empath that people renounce their idolatry and submit to the Christ of the Scriptures. Science and logic are not contrary to the honorific conception given, are not objective sciences. Well, science, natural science, it's not objective, it is not neutral, it is not invariant. And that's what I wish to show you in this hour. I think there's very good reason to call into question the uncritical conception of science which is encountered today. When people see science as objective, neutral and invariant, we should see that science, or theorizing in general cannot legitimately claim to be fully and objectively a justified enterprise any more than it can credibly be seen as an example of unity in our day and age. So that when people say, we'll just use the accepted methods of science or the accepted laws of logic, anybody who studies modern philosophy should say, in what, pray tell, would those be? What are the accepted methods of science and the laws of logic? At least two separate models of science can be countenanced in the past and current history of Western epistemology. I will call them the foundationalist model on the one hand, and the pragmatic model on the other. Foundationalism, which is the more traditional attempt to formulate theories which can eliminate arbitrariness in the face of the challenge of skepticism. Foundationalism aims to obtain cognitive certainty beyond psychological assurance. We need cognitive certainty, not just assurance inside us. And we gain that by anchoring our beliefs in some kind of secure basis, certain unassailable propositions. From that foundation, we can conduct intellectual inquiries according to strict and reliable methods of reasoning, admitting to our system of thought no proposition which is not certified by the foundation or by other foundationally certified beliefs, and thereby guaranteeing ourselves an accurate depiction of the world. Descartes is the obvious model. Here Descartes says, I must have clear and distinct ideas, and then I proceed from those clear and distinct ideas, those indubitable ideas by strict laws of logic and methods of reasoning, to other instances and conclusions. And if I'm just very cautious, then I'll finally have a worldview that is beyond challenge. But I've got to have that foundation, the clear and distinct ideas. Now, this model of science has enjoyed numerous devotees. You can find it in Aristotle, you find it in Descartes, as I've just said, the logical positivist and many others could be mentioned. But foundationalism overall is perhaps best seen as the banner of the Enlightenment. Reason must be given a secure starting point so that knowledge may be gained in the absence of cognitive imperialism, in the absence of arrogance and dogmatism and feedingism and all these other terrible things. That is, we can gain knowledge in the face of critical skepticism, thereby assuring that not all convictions have an equal claim to exception and requiring accordingly that conflicts be settled by argument rather than by passion or force. The people of the Enlightenment, they had one thing going for them. They realized that if they didn't have a foundation for their knowledge, then people would settle their disputes by war. And they didn't like that. And so they had this alternative. Common sense Foundationalism is found in an article like GE Moore's A Defense of Common Sense in Ludwig Wittgenstein's book Uncertainty and and Norman Malcolm's Knowledge and Certainty. The position is that certain universal and compulsively held beliefs about readily observable public fact are basic and presupposed by other beliefs. Beliefs like there are other people. People just compulsively believe that sort of thing. As the final courts of appeal in all inquiries and disputes, these common sense beliefs are logically beyond the possibility of correction. However, such beliefs, we must recognize, offer a jeopardized and, I think, unsuccessful candidate for foundational beliefs. For they do not provide infallible knowledge, but only incorrigible knowledge. It may be true that I can't doubt these common sense beliefs, but that doesn't mean they're infallible. It just means that I can't correct them. As unavoidably imposed as common sense beliefs may be, there's no guarantee that things actually are as they seem to us to be. In addition to that, what we call a phenomenological weakness. This version of foundationalism suffers great embarrassment by the faulty and conflicting ways in which common sense beliefs are identified and enumerated. As I think you can see, it's embarrassing to a person who says, well, these are the beliefs of common sense. And another person says, no, these are the beliefs of common sense, because, you see, they aren't held in common. People see common sense differently. So we shift from common sense foundationalism to what we will call perceptual Foundationalism. Perceptual foundationalism maintains that infallible basic propositions which transcend beliefs imposed upon us and give an objective depiction of things are found in sincere first person present tense reports of perceptual experience. For instance, I am now seeming to see a yellow pencil. First person present sense, perceptual experience. Advocates of this view include Chisholm in his book Perceiving, Roderick Firth in his articles in the Philosophical Review in the Journal of Philosophy, Bushvarov in the Concept of Knowledge and Pollock in Knowledge and Justification. They find the absence of any mediating agency between the knowing person and the private psychological state of which he is aware a guarantee that misinterpretation is precluded, that one cannot be misled. Now, the strength of direct perceptions is their non inferential character. Then the weakness of depending upon these alleged non inferential certitudes, however, is far more compelling. I think perceptual foundations for knowledge are not universal, isn't that right? Some people don't see anything, do they? People who are blind. And not every use of perception turns out to be veridical. There's such a thing as optical illusion. And our perceptions are not defeasible either. For instance, by referring to. Well, a normal perceiver in a normal circumstance will see things this way. For we can't be certain that we know every possible distorting condition or even that none of the known distorting conditions presently obtain, since perception would then be checked for normalcy by the possibly abnormal perceiving of yourself. Because you never can know when you're in that normal situation for perception. And so the problems of delusion and illusion preclude our having certainty that it is some external object which is appearing to us in the way that we are perceiving. Okay, A person who has the D keys is absolutely sure that it's an external object that is impinging on him. But you know very well that it's an internal chemical problem that is causing that perception. Okay, I've already made reference tonight to Quine's work on the analytic synthetic distinction. Quine and another fellow by the name of Watkins have written on this indicating that neither one of these terms, analytic or synthetic, can be elucidated without reference to the other, in which case conceptual and empirical components are unavoidably involved in and every proposition. You'll find that in Quine's book From a Logical Point of View and Watkins article in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Volume 10, both Wittgenstein and Sellers in his book Science, Perception and Reality have faulted the empiricist theory of concept formation, wherein the forming of the association between a color and a word, for instance, is to be paradigmatic of direct knowledge. It's been pointed out that acquiring any one concept is possible only when the person already possesses other concepts like the concept of shape, sound, location and the concept of color, by the way. And we can make judgments of similar any identity as there are presuppositions even for being able to learn the name of a color. If then concepts cannot be acquired one by one, non inferential or direct knowledge is precluded with the breakdown of the analytic synthetic distinction and the refutation of the empiricist theory of concept formation. We must recognize that all observation is unavoidably theory bound, never being purified of all interpretation, and thus not being removed from the possibility of error. And here you can read Quine's book Word and Object or Karl Popper's the Logic of Scientific Discussion Discovery of Popper's Conjectures and Refutations. Of course, to speak counterfactually, even if pure and infallible perceptual foundations could be acquired, what would be the secure, reliable method of reasoning by which we could build a system of thought outward from the foundation? Let's say that I could be absolutely sure that what I'm seeing is the color yellow. You have to admit that's not a whole lot for a philosophy to go on. You might want to add a few more propositions and maybe a few interesting connections between them. So how do I build out from I am now seeing yellow to further inference? Somebody says, well, by the method of deduction, right? Well, deduction would not allow us to accept the most elementary universal propositions about physical objects on the simple basis of particular perception. Okay, you say snow is white. Is that a universal proposition? Yes, it is. Have you universally looked at all snow? No. Well, then you can't say that snow is white. If you're going to use deduction, you need a universal proposition. All you have is particular perception. So we could not even be said to know, for instance, that all crows are black and all snow is white. So somebody says, no, we don't use deduction, we'll use probabilism, inductive reasoning. But probabilism or inductive reasoning can show neither that it's required assumption that nature is uniform is known with certainty, nor that it's even probably true. For in that case it would offer an inductive argument in Order to warrant the very premise needed to warrant inductive argumentation. That probably went by a little fast. Let me explain. Somebody says, well, every time I've seen a crow, it's black. And I must have seen probably 140 of them. And I said, okay, will Crow141 be black? Well, for him to say very probably at will, what do you assume about the world? He's assuming that there's uniformity in the world, right? Even probability assumes uniformity. Somebody who's going to argue for probability has to assume what to argue for probability that the world is uniform. So that my argument holds. The argument that I am beginning to use right now will be applicable in a minute and a half when I conclude it. So you have to assume probability or uniformity in order to prove uniformity. Now, falsification is sometimes offered as the method of reasoning, but falsification abandons any hope of providing a criterion for a belief being warranted by the foundational certitude it offers. Instead, the weaker condition of the beliefs being rejected according to the foundation. That it is not that I can prove my proposition by the foundation, it's that I can reject certain propositions by the foundation. However, even that weakened approach is of little help to a scientist. For no belief is understood in isolation from other beliefs. And no belief, as I said already tonight, meets the tribunal of sense perception. Individually. When a man who believes that he is dead is presented with the counter evidence that he bleeds when he's cut, he can choose to abandon the belief that he's dead, or he can reject the belief that dead men do not bleed. And therefore falsificationism does not enable us to build a system of knowledge outward from foundational certitude. For those foundations can never decisively falsify any particular belief in the context of empirical science. And to put it another way, the target for the arrow of modus tollen is hopelessly elusive. Modus colon is a logical move. If P, then Q, not Q, therefore not P. Okay, I have a theory. If P then Q, you show me not Q. But that arrow backwards doesn't tell me what I'm going to give up in my system to account for that. You can see LaCapas article in the book Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge for further discussion of these points. Now, failing to provide a secure starting point for reason or a reliable method for the growth of knowledge, the foundationalist model of science succumbs then to skepticism and leaves the justification of one's fundamental assumptions. An open Question. The ideal of presuppositionalist objectivity is shown to be an illusion, and the threat arises that there is no ultimately rational way to decide between conflicting claims. There's no way to decide between medicine and quackery for him, however. Skepticism not however, but just because of that, skepticism has emerged as a strong candidate in modern epistemology. You'll find it advocated in Unger's book Ignorance. It's ultimately conceded in Harman's book Thought, ultimately conceded in Lehrer's book Knowledge. The implication that all systems evidence equal cognitive merit has been shamefully welcomed by epistemological anarchists like Feriavind in his book Against Method and Fetish, like Phillips in his book Faith and Philosophical Inquiry. If science cannot offer a justification for its foundations, then arbitrariness can no longer be countered or disapprobated. We're back to skepticism now to the skeptics challenge that reasoning and its products are unreliable. A more recent response then, has arisen what might be called the pragmatic model of science. Here it is contended that because scientific methods have been seen to have a greater potential for rendering beliefs that are true and successful than other procedures, the standard for judging rationality should be the actual logic of scientific inquiry as it's currently being practiced. And some of the most prestigious philosophers of our day advocate just that kind of answer. You'll find that in Quine, you'll find it in Sellers, you'll find it in Popper. And certainly no intelligent person today wishes to deny the successes of science. And so you see, there's a great persuasive force for this. Nevertheless, there are clearly existed people, I think, who would ordinarily have been deemed rational people, and yet knew nothing of the scientific practices of our own culture and era. And it would be a resort to desperation to suggest that. But those people are or were not really rational because they didn't do science the way we do it today. More importantly, it has been shown repeatedly throughout the history of philosophy that science itself rests upon presuppositions, the general organizing principles of experience, which are neither true by definition nor evaluated by experience, since it is their role to evaluate experience instead. Now, this has been observed in the case of Aristotle's categories, Kant, synthetic a priori principles, and Collingwood's absolute presupposition that science depends upon presuppositions which it cannot in the nature of the case justify by its own method, has been taught by philosophers like Plato, Descartes, Berkeley, Hume, and a host of others. So Much so that it ought to be by now a commonplace among students of philosophy. And therefore, to meet skepticism head on and to legitimate science, one will be forced to do philosophy. In which case, if the presuppositions of scientific practice can be justified at all, philosophy would more appropriately deserve to be taken as the paradigm of rationality rather than science. The common justification for science and its assumptions, which concerns us now, is that scientific inquiries as presently practiced are fruitful. Scientists are doing the right things because they're getting success. They're solving important problems, enabling us to cope with the world. The indebtedness of modern proponents of this answer to Pears and CI Lewis, who's rather obvious, who's a student of the history of philosophy. With science we may better achieve our goal. The pragmatic answer rests, of course, upon the previous acceptance of a certain goal. And thus, at this point we must not become intellectually lazy. We must press on and ask critically about the rationality or the arbitrariness of our choice of goal. We can grant the superiority of science's problem solving tools only after we are convinced that science is dealing with the right problems in the first place. So then, why should our goal be that of coping with the environment instead of the alternative, perhaps more weighty aims of mystical union with nature, interpersonal rapport, appreciation of beauty, and on and on? There are other options, you see. What justifies adherence to the particular goal chosen by the empirical scientists. Perhaps that goal is simply arbitrary, consequently reintroducing relativism and skepticism into science. Now, to avoid arbitrariness and question begging, an external justification of the chosen goal becomes necessary, forcing the pragmatist to go outside of epistemology and to naturalize, as we say, to naturalize his procedures. This justification will be descriptive in nature, claiming that a given agent, the scientist, succeeds in getting to his given goal if he adheres to a given system or method. Now, when the agent is an individual and the goal is dictated by self interest, epistemology is naturalized or reduced to psychology, which is what you find in Quine's article Epistemology Naturalized and Piaget's Genetic Psychology. If the agent is the species, all the human species, and the goal of science is the survival of the species, epistemology is naturalized into biology, which is what you find in Parker's Objective Knowledge and Stephen Toulman's Human Understanding. If you take the agent as a social class and the goal as its domination over other classes, epistemology reduces to sociology or history, as in Marxist epistemology. As you find also in the sociology of knowledge, when the agent is seen as a culture with the goal of serving its conventional aims, epistemology is reduced to anthropology, which is what you find in Winch's book the Idea of a Social Science. Now, the trouble with all of these naturalizing epistemology, which reduced one branch of descriptive, which reduced to one branch of descriptive science or another, is that they answer the request a justification of science by simply skirting it. Epistemology is a normative endeavor, not simply a descriptive enterprise which connects agents and methods and goals. So the quest for justification is an evaluative one, just because the alternative goals need to be apprised, excuse me, appraised as to their respective value. The recommendations that epistemology be naturalized are but contemporary concessions, I think, of despair in solving the ultimate issues of justification, leaving us without any way to rationally criticize or warrant the goals of science. So science, it turns out, lacks objectivity, neutrality and invariance in our day, can offer no justification, irrigationally or pragmatically. But what it's doing now, if the common conception of science is a presuppositionalist and strict, which overcomes skeptical relativism by offering justification for its assumptions and procedures, is now recognized as mythical in character. The view of science is a settled and invariant manner of argumentation fares no better. The whole field of meta argumentation, or the philosophy of logic has been opened up for valuable discussion since the days of Russell and Whitehead, Principia Mathematica, and the early Carnap's teaching. In that former era, the formalization of logical notation and the formal concise statement of the principles of logic, as well as the defense of the logicistic thesis that mathematics can be reduced to simple logical truths which display a true, under all circumstances, character in virtue of their triviality. All of that engendered the view that logic is a formal calculus which does not vary from field to field, from study to study. Now, from that position, the logical positivist went on to hold that all factual claims must be verifiable by set empirical methods, which would likewise break down distinctions among the various sciences once scholars rejected the residual superstitions and premises of certain disciplines, such as the idea of an inner world in psychology, what arose was the movement for a unified science, which portrayed the academic division into branches of study as pure convenience, since all empirical sciences were fundamentally one in method. The settled and unitary character of science, however, could not long be maintained. In the 20th century, in his book Dilemmas, Gilbert Ryle accurately observed that the positivists were not dealing with logic as a whole, they were dealing with only a subsection of argumentation, one which turned on the meaning of certain terms like some, all. And if then this invariant formal logic, as it's now called, had been allowed to swallow up the whole domain of informal logic, wherein arguments turn on different terms and concepts altogether than the those. The investigations and arguments which commonly occupy scholars in the various scientific disciplines display a pattern in each respective field that is not followed in others. And so Ryle wrote, and I quote, there is no such animal as science. There are scores of sciences. Each science has its own method. There are many logics, not simply one single calculus for weighing arguments. Stephen Toulmin, in his book the Uses of Argument, furthered that case against taking logic as a formal calculus to be the whole of the discipline of argumentation. And then when we come down to Polani's personal knowledge and Hanson's patterns of discovery, and especially Thomas Kuhn's book the Structure of Scientific Revolution, we get beyond the idea of inter field variance, where every field has its own way of arguing. We get to the view of intra field variance as well, or even within the field of biology, within the field of physics, or within the field of sociology. Different schools of thought have different methods and different standards and paradigms to understand the working history of science. Kuhn speaks of incommensurable paradigms which espouse unique views on the basic issues of a field, offer a model for problem solving, stipulate the fixed points of conviction, and constitute a disciplinary matrix of commitment to particular standards and methods. In short, what he says is what we've said already tonight, that every approach, every outlook on life has its own different method to use. And that's not just a different method in biology, as in physics, but there are different methods within biology, between schools of thought and biology. So we surveyed two widely held models. So we've surveyed two widely held models of science, the foundationalist model and the pragmatic model. Neither could be said to be successful in offering a complete and objective justification for beliefs and methods in the scientific quest for knowledge. We've also surveyed the progressive recognition that rational argumentation and scientific method are anything but universal, settled and invariant from field to field, or from school to school within a field. And so our survey leads us a great distance away from the ever popular conception that the scientific method is the scientific method. My friends, there's no such thing as the scientific method. It's a myth. When people work with that fictional ideal of Scientific rationality, objectivity and neutrality. They really feel themselves to be pursuing pie in the sky of a genuine variety, even though those very people are the ones who like to accuse theologians of doing the same. Oh, but somebody says, okay, science. Science may not be invariant, science may not be useful, science may not be objective, but certainly logic is. How could anybody have any trouble with logic? Two important and conflicting approaches to apologetics are represented by John Warwick Montgomery and Gordon Clark. And yet their attitude towards formal logic is absolutely identical. Montgomery speaks of the common rationality which all men share. He insists that the distinction between analytic and synthetic judgment shows that to demand absolute certainty is to obtain pure formality and thus no knowledge at all of the world. Only deductive logic and pure mathematics provide aphrodistic certainty. He said absolute truth is possible only in formal logic. Likewise, Gordon Clark teaches that while certainty is impossible with empirical science, memory, common opinion, etc. The laws of logic cannot be questioned since they are universal, necessary and known, a priori known apart from experience. He says the eternal principles called logic are the prerequisites of all argumentation, being basic to every aspect of theorizing. In fact, so settled is logic that Clark says that he sees logic as God thinking, as the basic image of God in man, and as many of you will already know, so he can translate. John 1 In the beginning, was the logic. Well, Montgomery and Clark don't see eye to eye unapologetics by any means, but they do agree that absolute certainty is available only in pure formal logic. And I have here, for the sake of time, I will not read, but I have numerous quotations from others, including Arthur Sproul, who will be taken up later in our series. This is a very common view in evangelical apologetics. In fact, this attitude is so easy to acquire in secondary literature or introduction sometimes to formal logic, and is so cherished for various reasons that a serious look at the actual phenomena of logical study, if one has the stamina to carry it out, and I grant you it takes stamina to read this sort of stuff, holds the potential for an awaking which can be described as nothing other than rude. If you've been brought up on that sophomoric opinion of logic and you finally get into graduate school and study logic, believe me, it's going to be like a cold slap in the face. Serious confusion and disagreement within the discipline of logic, threatening as a model of scientific study today, where key conflicts seem irresolvable, especially in the absence of any clear account of the proper object of logical study and the appropriate evidence for claims about it. Now, I'm just going to try to summarize here a bit of my written lecture for the sake of time, because I want you to have opportunity to ask questions tonight. Let me just see if I can put very quickly what the problem and the foundations of logic is today. When people speak of the unity of logical study, they are engaged in what's called revisionist study. When somebody does a history of philosophy and says everybody agrees to the three laws of thought are to this logical structure, you can be very sure what they are doing is gerrymandering the evidence. They're going around and picking and choosing what they want. The most obvious example of that is that 23 centuries of Hindu and Buddhist logic are never covered in freshman text and logic. And yet logic is done much differently in Buddhist and Hindu thought than it is in Aristotelian thought. In fact, not even negation is understood in the same way in Hindu and Buddhist books on logic. And somebody says, okay, well what we meant is Western logic is invariant. Of course, he's already killed the universality of his insight when he says that. But you see, not even Western logic is invariant. The logic of thought hygienic interest that we find in Descartes is not the logic of all encompassing philosophical interests in Kant, Hegel and Bradley. Nor is it the logic of empirical interest in Mill, of mathematical interest in Boolean, de Morgan, of formal interest in Russell and Weicher. In fact, logics which deal with other basic concepts in quantity, disjunction, et cetera, are easily ignored by popular writers. For instance, you don't hear anything about deontic logic or docsastic logic or modal logic. When you do this elementary introduction, and even when you do restrict your attention to recent Western formal logic of the first order predicate logic through functional connective storage. I mean, we just reduce the field way, way, way down. Even when you do that, the illusion of beautiful often arises only from an unwillingness to raise questions. Because you start raising questions, you're going to find out when people don't even agree in that narrow alley. Because formal logic has been the focus of the most intense philosophical research over the last decades. I want to discuss issues that are germane only to it, only to formal logic. And basically what I point out if I was going to continue on is if you do a history of logic, you'll find out that that throughout the history of logic, schools of logic have disagreed with one another over what the logical laws are. For instance, the law of excluded middle has Been a real candidate for rejection by a number of schools of thought throughout the history of philosophy. And yet, you know, I went through four years of college, I was a philosophy major. Nobody bothered to point that out. I just took it for granted that, you know, the three laws of thought, of course, everybody except those, it's not true though. It's just historically not true. Now somebody can say, but the people who rejected it, they aren't logical. What's the problem? Well, of course you're begging the question as to what amounts to logic when you say that sort of thing. And maybe they aren't. That's not like I'm not telling you reject the law of excluded middle. I'm just saying that the law of excluded middle has been rejected by people who would ordinarily have been thought to be very good philosophers. What are the logical laws then? Ask Pylo. Theodorus will tell you different. Ask the Stoics, the Megarians will tell you different. What are the appropriate syllogists? Well, throughout medieval philosophy there's debate on this. In modern philosophy we have not only debate over which laws are to be accepted logical laws. You have debate also over the very question of whether logic can be applied to reality, how to translate out of natural language into a formalized system. You have debates with the intuitionist schools of mathematics and logic. Quantum physics have created disputes in logic. And not only that, we no longer have simple bivalent logic where you have two values in logic, but you have multi valued logic that have been developed. Logic just isn't this unified invariant field that people make it out to be. Now I think all of that's very important and embarrassing to the view that logic is uniform, objective and neutral. But the thing that gets me even more than that is the fact that when we logicians want to argue about their particular conviction in logic, the only way they can dispute with one another or prove their point is by first of all agreeing on what they're dealing with when they're dealing with logical laws. Because the kind of evidence you offer for something is going to be geared to the object that you're dealing with. And if you read the textbooks on modern philosophy of logic, you're going to find it's an absolute zoo when it comes to deciding what a law of logic is. The law of logic, simply an utterance out of my mouth, ink on a page, talk on a board. The law of logic, just traditional psychological moves within my mind. The law of logic, some kind of universal Platonic form. What is the law of logic? And since logicians can't agree on that question, they can't agree on how to settle their disputes in the 20th century either. What I'm suggesting here, very briefly and inadequately, is that the metaphysical foundations of logic challenge the ability for logicians to agree. And since they can't agree and don't have a set method for settling their disagreements, one would have to question the scientific status of modern logic. Is it really a scientist when there's no commonality of method for settling their disagreements? And so the unsettled nature of the discipline of logic is nowhere more clearly indicated than in the fact that the leading scholars in the field cannot even agree as to what their claims are about. What kind of rational evidence can be offered for those claims? What little trivial agreement might appear to be found in certain token inscriptional sequences similar from writer to writer. For instance, everybody will agree if A is B, and if B is C, then A is C. Those things are emptied of rational significance by the differences which are as fundamental as those that I just noted as to what is the law of logic and what kind of evidence can be offered. For Morris Cohen says this in a preface to Logic. He freely admits and I if by logic is meant a clear, accurate and orderly intellectual procedure, then the subject of logic as presented in current textbooks comes near being the most illogical in our chaotic curriculum. So logic does not turn out to be an invariant field of elementary self evident beliefs in self procedures by which all reasonable and educated men have arrived uniformly and with absolute certainty at agreed upon truths, rules and evaluation. Nor have we found that logic pertains a relationship to other fields of study which is solely and uniquely a one way foundational relationship. Logic is not neutral and it's not objective. And if it can't be these things, it doesn't deserve the honorific name scientific. What is our real brief look at modern epistemology and history philosophy shown us tonight? It's shown us that all men have worldviews, all men have their indubitables, their presuppositions, the center of the web of their beliefs, if you will, and that their methods for settling disputes will be determined by their worldview and their presuppositions. So that you can't argue between schools of thought based upon common methods because the schools of thought determine differing methods. You can't even argue about your methodological differences because the very argument over methodology presupposes what the method that's in dispute. People can grant revisionary immunity to just about any proposition they want. They can protect it from falsification by being willing to make adjustments elsewhere in their system of thought. They don't accept claims one by one. They accept them in clusters or groups. Science cannot be sharply segregated from metaphysics, epistemological. And then when we look as Christians at the modern philosophical epistemological themes, the foundations of science have eroded. So there is no longer a common view of justification, objectivity. There's no neutrality, no invariance, not even within a field of thought. And even the laws of logic, even the three traditional laws of logic of Aristotle, are not invariant, objective, neutral and justified. But you see, we have a way out of this mind. The presuppositional method of apologetics can deal with that. As I said last night, Dr. Van Til maintains that we should take a transcendental approach to our differences of thought, challenging the unbeliever to make sense out of the laws of logic which we've just seen they're not able to do very well today out of the procedures of science, which they're not able to do today. And since we've already answered the fool according to his folly in one very brief sense, that lest he be wise in his own conceit, let me go on to point out that we can answer the fool not according to his folly, lest we be like unto him, we can answer by our own worldview, our own presupposition. For within the Christian outlook on life in the world and behavior, there is such a thing as science and logic and human experience and ethics and all the rest. That there is a worldview that can make sense of these things, that can account for the progress in science and industry, in medicine and all the rest. In a long article that Harry Frankfurt once wrote on the subject of doubt in the encyclopedia Philosophy, he concluded the claim that a basis for doubt is inconceivable. When somebody claims that there's no basis for doubt, it's inconceivable that you could doubt this proposition. He says the claim that a basis for doubt is inconceivable is justified whenever a denial of the claim would violate the conditions or presuppositions of rational inquiry. Somebody says, I have a proposition which can't be doubted. He says that the justified claim, if the denial of that proposition violates the precondition of rational inquiry. But that's exactly what Dr. Van Till has been saying for years. How do we know the certainty of the Christian faith from the impossibility of the contrary? How do I know that my Christian worldview is true? Because when you deny it. The preconditions of rational inquiry are destroyed. And so Christianity is, to use Terry Frankfurt's words here, at least in a formal Christianity is indubitable. It is beyond doubt if it alone can rescue science and logic and ethics and human personality. The Survey of Christian Epistemology pages 204, 205 and 225. Dr. Van Til says the Reformed method of argument is first constructed. It presents the biblical view positively by showing that all factual and logical discussions by men take place by virtue of the world's 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 interpretations fails instantly. 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 contract. Now I know tonight's lecture has been less interesting and easy to follow than last night, but I believe that what I've been telling you is very important to understand that last long quotation from Dr. Van Til. The study of modern epistemology leaves you precise to that same method. Worldviews are in collision and we must argue from the impossibility of the contrary. Only the Christian position salvages science and logic. What is it that I taught you last night? That little argument to memorize the proof that the Christian God exists is that without him you can't prove anything. We must reduce our opponents positions to absurdity. Answer the fool according to his folly lest to be wise in his own conceit and then constructively showing him that a Christian world and life view can make sense of science and logic and the progress of human knowledge. So biblically and philosophically I want to commend to you what Dr. Van Tille has been writing now for all nearly half a century. If you have some questions before 9:30 rolls around, I'd be happy to answer or try to answer some of them. And when you come back tomorrow night we'll start by looking at some of the critics of Dr. Van Til's system. And in particular tomorrow we'll be looking at Gordon Clark. The night after that we'll be looking at John Warwick Montgomery and R.C. sproul and then in our final night together, Francis Schaefer. And I'd like to set those systems of apologetics over against Dr. Van Til. The point that I will be making is they are not on a continuum with presuppositionalism. They are across the chasm. Epistemologically, they are not arguing transcendental. Presuppositionally, they are not arguing that our opponent's position is to be reduced to absurdity, shown that logic and science are impossible without the Christian worldview. Now, do you have any questions you'd like to address? This is not the best night to begin with questions I realize you may want to get the tape and play it at half speed. What was he saying tonight? Yes, sir. Nevertheless, I think what you've done is starting to say is diverse exists in autonomous man through the model variant system. I think the fast impairment units of worldview, I think even a clearer diversity and conflict. And by demonstrating that and putting them and leaving them without a life of family services, I think. But what happens when they're enough to turn that around enough and say, all right, what do you offer? Where is your continuity? Where is your consensus? And if you're going to tell me about your Christian faith, what are the parameters for that? Because the diversity is great. As my scientific world, all the way from I came in saying John right Baptist churches offering to have a little F behind. That's precisely why we do not offer a lowest common denominator Christianity in our apologetic. Because then that response would be, you know, perfectly legitimate. What I'm offering is Christianity understood as the Reformed to theologians have summarized it, because I believe that Calvinism is the Gospel. What I present then is not Christianity stripped of Calvinism and Arminianism down to some lowest form. I present my Calvinism as the good news of God. That that Calvinism, which is just what Paul and what Isaiah and Moses were teaching, that that Calvinistic understanding of the Scriptures is a worldview different from the Armenian worldview, different from the Hindu worldview, different from the naturalist worldview, and that it's only that Calvinist worldview that can salvage science and logic and ethics and personality. Your understanding of your Christianity based on Scripture, and then not only from the concept of Scripture, but one particular group of manuscripts of corpus is varying. Not only do we have a particular group of manuscripts, you have your own term of music as well and another popular music. How do you think if they're perception, that's the word to Be aware of all these factors down to the narrowness of historic Calvinist understanding, maybe this 20th century Calvinist understanding that in modified as having been the product of modifying the. By arguing from the impossibility of the contrary that when you do not have that understanding of the sovereign God you have a worldview where chance is ultimate. And where chance is ultimate you can have no universal laws of logic, no induction is reliable. And it's just the same argument over and over again. Now if the person wants to argue within the Christian circle about modification of a particular verse or a set of verses or of my textual critical method and all that, well that's perfectly legitimate. But again in the end the standard is what going to be the Scriptures which give me a worldview by which I can go and do my textual criticism of the Scripture. Well, the only way I can understand that is that you mean where do I start in dealing with the person and I start where his problems are. And so I, I don't think that it's like where, where do, where does every dream journey begin when people take vacations in the United States? Well, there's no answer to that question. It all depends on where the people are and where they're trying to go in the journey. Yeah, That I can communicate the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit. No, in the nature of the case that's what the Holy Spirit does. The Holy Spirit is the one who gives that testimony. I don't. Reduced to admitting what that means. But wait a moment, you're not understanding by this that the Holy Spirit internal testimony, it's testimony to something other than what the gospel itself testifies, are you? What the testimony coming in power convincing men of the truth of the gospel. Not of some other truth, not beyond the gospel or less than the gospel, but rather it's a testimony to the gospel. And so what I am, what I am arguing about the gospel the Holy Spirit gives internal testimony to. When the man is converted he's convicted. And if you tell him that. I'm not convicted. So I can't. Oh that I, I have. You know, although there's plenty of Calvinist hand wringing and discussion of that. I'll be very honest with you. I have never once had difficulty in telling somebody. I realize this is difficult for you to understand and I also know that you will not accept it unless God by his grace changes your heart. I go on to say the reason for that is that your heart is hard. You have an axe to grind. You have reason not to want to believe that. Let's just be honest, okay? I have reason to want to believe it. You may call it wishful thinking. I say you have reason not to want to believe it because you have an axe to grind. And I really have never found that to be a problem. I will communicate to him that, as a matter of fact, conversion must take place, and that will only happen by God's grace. But the fact that God, you might say mysteriously, or even some people say mystically, does something in the heart of man to make that conversion come about doesn't change the fact that a conversion to a point of view that is utterly right, rational, not rationalistic, but rational. And it's that which I am arguing, the rationality of my Christian faith. In fact, I'm arguing that only the Christian faith has rationality, that everything short of it is irrational. The scientists and the logicians of our day are the last people in the world we should worry about in apologetics. They have nothing to stand on. It is just utter skepticism today. Okay? And so if they want to come back and say, oh, but you're relying on some conversion experience and saying, absolutely I am, but short of that, you have nothing left at all. That's your only hope. I'm going to begin preaching. One more question. Okay. The self understandably unlockable ideas, certainly novels. I'm wondering if you can comment on the usefulness and uses of the 70s. I mean, in view of the fact that. That. You're asking about the. In light of the fact that it's only the Holy Spirit that gives conviction. Conversion and conviction. When we are engaged in this. What is the evangelistic value of. Of apologetics in general or of this apologetic in particular? Well, I actually, I appreciate that question if I've understood it, because as a matter of fact, other apologetical schools do not take their method from the Scripture. In fact, they're very sensitive about it. They say to take our method from the Scripture is to beg the question. We can't beg the question. We must go to the unbeliever and say, what method do you use? What will you accept? Now I will take those two. This recording has been released into the public domain by the Bonson Institute. Duplication, sharing and distribution is encouraged. For more information about the life and Ministry of Dr. Greg L. Bonson, visit our website, Bonson, where we aim to bring into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ.