Transcendental Arguments (6 of 10) – Summary of Transcendental Arguments, Part 1

[00:00] But he uses Donald Davidson to try to show that there is only one possible conceptual scheme. And the way he shows it is by, I’m going to give you a thumbnail sketch of Donald Davidson’s argument. It’s going to be real simple, and Donald Davidson, who’s a brilliant philosopher, is much more nuanced than this, but let me give you the guinea on it.

[00:17] Donald Davidson’s article on the very idea of a conceptual scheme takes issue with the fact that a lot of philosophers discuss this idea or discuss the notion of conceptual scheme without knowing what they’re really talking about the conclusion that davidson draws is that there is no such thing as a conceptual scheme now really to be a little unfair what he means is there’s really only one conceptual scheme but he says in the process that really just talk about conceptual schemes is unintelligible or meaningless because we have to view the world in a certain way. Now, why does he say that? Well, he’s a conscious follower of Quine, the Clarkson Quine on several points. Quine talked about, had articles on the indeterminacy of translation, and I don’t want to go into all of Quine, but Quine said that translations, or radical translations, translating a previously unknown tongue, always brings about a level of indeterminacy, that fundamentally, the way you interpret another tongue is going to have indeterminacy embedded within it and his famous example is for the linguist to be out in the field with these aborigines and the linguist has had no contact or no westerner had had contact with these aborigines and so he’s trying to figure out their language and so up through the bushes comes what the linguist would call the rabbit the bunny rabbit and when the native sees it he points and says gavagai now the linguist at that point as a hypothesis puts in his notebook gavagai means rabbit okay now later on it could be that it means as dr Bahnsen pointed out fast rabbit or there’s a rabbit running or whatever but for his present purposes that’s the best hypothesis he has and so as he goes about his work he discovers that yeah that hypothesis seems to hold and that gavagai is equivalent to rabbit. But Quine points out this, that even though that’s the best hypothesis, he’s really not given at all a conclusive translation to Davagai at all, because there’s other possibilities that will fit within a translation manual. He could have a different manual of translation. Instead of translating Davagai as rabbit, he could translate it, and you’re going to laugh, but this is an important article in philosophy, so please don’t laugh.

[02:37] He could translate it as undetached rabbit part. Look, there goes underpassed rabbit part. He could also translate Gavagai as there goes a spatial temporal time slice of rabbit hood. Okay, and we could play this game on and on. What Quine is saying is there’s not one right translation of the name Gavagai. There are other possibilities depending upon the manual of translation that you use and the theory which you bring into it. We don’t know what the theory of the world or the conceptual scheme that the Aborigine has. We know ours, and we’re trying to marry ours up to his and try to get as close as we can in order to be able to translate back and forth.

[03:18] But even if the linguist, at the point where he understands the language in the sense that he can communicate with the Aborigine, and he can speak about Gavagai and all stuff like that, he still doesn’t know, even though there’s communication, whether what he means marries up with what the speaker means. He will never be able to tell, he can never devise a task, to see if he means undetached rabbit parts or a rabbit.

[03:44] Okay, now, that’s a bit tough. And the philosophical point that Quine’s making is that translation between any person is indeterminate and that our theory of the world determines our manual of translation. Okay, this is Quine’s radical behaviorism coming out. In other words, he’s saying that meaning has no objective value.

[04:05] Okay, now, Davidson comes along and says, Yeah, there is something to this whole discussion that Quine has in his book, Word and Object, where that argument is found. However, we have to translate that person in a way that is appropriate with our way of looking at the world. In order to recognize a language at all, we have to translate it in terms that are intelligible to us. And so when we come across the aborigine who shouts out Gavagai, using the principle of charity, using the fact that we should interpret him in the best light, we have to or we ought to interpret him as saying, there goes a rabbit rather than these other exotic formulations. Okay, so Davidson is saying that our conceptual scheme sets the limits or our way of looking at the world sets the limits for how we can interpret other people. Now, I’m leaving out a lot of detail, and some of it is a bit skewed. I understand that. I’m just trying to get this out before you.

[05:02] So Davidson’s argument, then, is that there is no such thing as a conceptual scheme simply because I cannot translate somebody else’s language into a different conceptual scheme than my own. It makes no sense. I wouldn’t be able to understand it. If somebody really had a different conceptual scheme than I did, I wouldn’t be able to recognize that person as a speaker of another language. If I were to ever recognize somebody as speaking a language, I have to presuppose that he’s operating within the same conceptual scheme as I am myself. Otherwise, I would never recognize what he was doing as speaking a language. If I didn’t look at him and see that he was behaving intelligibly and speaking in a certain way and interpreted him in terms of my conceptual scheme, I couldn’t recognize his behavior as intelligent or purposeful or having any type of intelligibility.

[05:51] Okay, now that’s quick, and you might have a lot of questions with that. Bottom line is, there is no such thing as a conceptual scheme because it makes no sense to talk about it. It makes no sense about talking about the aborigine conceptual scheme and my conceptual scheme. And as far as I can translate his language into mine, we have to have the same type of concept going on.

[06:12] Okay, Rayling uses that type of consideration to try to prove that there is only one possible conceptual scheme. Now, it’s a bit sloppy. Davidson, remember, saying there’s really no such thing as a conceptual scheme. And for our purposes, it’s a bit unfair, but we’re going to translate that into meaning. There is only one possible conceptual scheme. Grayling picks up on that insight, or that alleged insight, and claims that this is just what I need for my option B argument. my option B type transcendental argument needs supplement by anti-relativistic arguments all I’ve shown is that certain types of concepts are necessary for my experience and the skeptic comes along and says well maybe there’s other types of experiences, maybe there’s other types of conceptual schemes to which he uses Davidson’s arguments to respond no, this is the only possible conceptual scheme okay, that was Dan and Dury, anybody have any questions on that?

[07:07] Go right the person i translate into english i mean he can mean interpersonal translation between one english speaker and another as well but let’s talk about in terms of two different languages the only reason i could even view you as a language teacher is because i see you behave in certain ways and speak in certain ways and the way i hear you i interpret them in terms of my conceptual scheme when your language comes to me i interpret it in terms of my conceptual scheme If I didn’t do that, I wouldn’t even recognize what you were doing as linguistic behavior at all. I was simply seeing you making noises and saying, well, I don’t know what that thing is, but it’s certainly not speaking a language. I wouldn’t be able to recognize, in other words, something that was behaving in certain ways unless I wouldn’t be able to recognize it as a language speaker unless I viewed it as speaking a language that was translatable into mine. In other words, that shared the same conceptual scene as my language is allegedly embedded in.

[08:05] Translation occurs, and the only, the precondition for that is that this is the only conceptual scheme. You deny that, you wouldn’t even be able to recognize another language. Okay. Now, we can make short work out of Davidson, I think. There’s a lot to say, and we don’t have time to go into it. Basically, though, really, how much does this cut away the skeptics?

[08:43] If it is true that you can only ever say there’s only one conceptual scheme in the sense that we can only recognize speakers of other languages if we assume or presume that they show our conceptual scheme, that doesn’t mean that they really do, right? And that also means that those that do have intelligibility or that do have a different conceptual scheme, that we’d never be able to recognize them. But that has nothing to do with the fact that they actually do have another conceptual scheme.

[09:09] Davidson’s point is strictly epistemological. It’s that we can never know about another conceptual scheme. It says nothing about whether there really are other conceptual schemes. There could be other conceptual schemes. Davidson’s whole point, the way Grayling uses Davidson, is simply to show that we can never epistemologically recognize a different conceptual scheme.

[09:30] okay now let’s also ask this and let’s bring a theological consideration we view the world in such and such a way and david says well we have to you can’t even conceive of something that doesn’t conceive of the world in the way we do well what does the bible say about that our thoughts or our god’s thoughts our thoughts and vice versa to a certain degree our thoughts are reflections of his thoughts when we’re thinking correctly to a certain degree but But are the limits of our conceptual scheme, if we want to speak that way, the limits of God’s conceptual scheme? Absolutely not.

[10:06] Davidson, by making this argument, not only is his epistemological point really doesn’t destroy the skeptic because of the ontological considerations, but also theologically have a reason to debunk this whole type of thing. We know that God’s outlook is different than ours. Okay, and we’re going to establish that by fantillion transcendental arguments. But the point now is, Davidson really is begging the question here, because we can recognize somebody with a different conceptual scheme with ours, God. He shares a certain conceptual outlook as we do, or we share a certain amount of his conceptual outlook, but other parts of God’s conceptual outlook are unknowable to us, and will be in our unknowable principle. That doesn’t mean we say, well, but God can’t really have a different conceptual scheme. No, we know that God does. He told us within our own conceptual scheme that he has a larger conceptual scheme than we do.

[10:56] Okay. Well, he gives us deeper insight into when we’re generated. He gives us the ability to understand his revelation to us. But still, we’re still operating within human faculties. I mean, there’s something that – revelation doesn’t give us exhaustive knowledge of God. Because of the knowledge that God was pleased to reveal to us, but beyond that, we don’t know.

[11:21] Okay, well, that’s so much for Grayling’s article. He ends it by stating that the primary importance of transcendental arguments resides in the fact that we have to reflect on our concepts and beliefs from the internal perspective of having to use them even as we investigate them. There is no external point from which we can view our conceptual scheme.

[11:41] Like Neurath’s ship sailors, we have to rebuild our ship at sea. This is a famous example by a logical empiricist called Otto Neurath. Basically, the analogy is we have this conceptual scheme that’s like a ship that we’re sailing on. If we want to change anything in it, we can’t dry dock it. It’s not an option. We’re out in the middle of the sea. So we have to change things beam by beam and plank by plank. We couldn’t do a complete overhaul of the hull, otherwise we’d sink. So we have to keep our systemological ships afloat. In order to do so when it’s damaged, we have to replace one beam with another one. We just can’t replace the whole hall at one time. So that’s what he means by that illustration.

[12:19] Transcendental arguments offer ways of reflecting on our concepts, which at least promise to tell us much about their nature and interrelations, and about the degree of strength possessed by skeptical challenges to our use of them. Now, there’s something right and something wrong with this last statement. Transcendental arguments in the sense that we’ve been discussing, primarily option B form, conceptual transcendental arguments, do show us and can be helpful in showing us that particular type of things like causation are necessary for our experience. Okay, but then he comes and says that we are in this position like Neurath sailor, and that we can only piecemeal build our epistemological ship together. And this is something that is fundamentally opposed by worldview transcendental type arguments.

[13:06] Grayling believes that transcendental arguments are to be done the piecemeal way. You know, we’ve said this type of thing is necessary for this type of experience. This type of thing, this type of concept is necessary for this type of experience. Okay, and then we try to keep our ship afloat by proving these type of things.

[13:22] Van Til is going to come, as we’ve seen yesterday, say, no, no, that’s not the way to do it at all. The way to do it is to dry dock it and to show what are the necessary preconditions for all experience. And the only way to do that is evaluating worldview.

[13:36] And so the modern contemporary debate on transcendental arguments and what we learn from it, We see that contemporary transcendental arguments are fundamentally different in nature from Cornelius Van Til’s worldview transcendental arguments. They’re two different birds altogether. Formally, they share some aspects. They both try to feel transcendental. And even the way they go about doing that, there’s some analogy, reductio ad absurdum. But the scope of them is different, and the manner of which they are argued are different as well.

[14:10] Van Til argues worldviews are the only way in which transcendental arguments work. Temporary proponents say that only particular transcendental arguments are the things that can go by, the things that we can view. And interestingly, Grayling doesn’t even consider that as a possibility. I mean, he just assumes this at the end. He never even brings about this type of consideration. He just says, our predicament is Neurath Schiff. He doesn’t even consider the worldview methodology or the worldview approach. And you know why that is? He’s an autonomous man.

[14:41] If you want to take a small stroke, because if you do this stroke, then you have to move on to quickly the heat of problem. That’s too much micro. I mean, I want to say to Grayling, big deal. You’ve showed that we need the concept of causation. Okay, I mean, I could agree with that. I mean, we could disagree about the particulars of Trossman’s argument and say, well, you didn’t really do a good job, Trossman. But even if he had a good argument, big deal. What is the worldview in which you can account for causation? Okay, we need causation. What is the worldview in which causation can be accounted for?

[15:13] We need a transcendental argument for these transcendentals. What worldview makes all these types of particular transcendentals coherent? How does our belief in the necessity of the external world or the continual existence of non-observed objects, how do you tie those together? I mean, it’s just like one, one, one here, and there’s no connection? No, he doesn’t even consider the possibility. They’re all corresponding to the analytical stuff. Absolutely.

[15:41] See, even these people who are considered kind of weird by a lot of philosophers who are doing these transcendental type of stuff, you know, this stuff that most analytic philosophers think is disreputable, even these people who are kind of the wild guys who are into these transcendental arguments end up in the same type of pedantic situation that the analytical philosophers do. They don’t consider what are the necessary conditions for arguing transcendentally. so they come into it with certain assumptions and never are able to justify them and are never able to tie their transcendentals together well yeah Thank you.

[16:36] So even if you have a micro-transcendental argument, one little element of my thinking, I’ll put the stone and a barley decode to fall in feed and water. Who cares? Without a building of time, it’s together. You need to have logic and an external world, and a mind to conduct the external world, and you need to remove the world’s use. If it’s friends and dental are necessary, it’s even the smaller transcendental argument, it’s water.

[17:03] Right. But it’s a lot to get hard on the Friday night, right? No, that’s going to be true, but it’s not going to convict Alan here. What Mike is telling me is that even if you have a heart of age, if you don’t have a mind that can be in touch with reality, it thinks heart of age, and you can’t give an account of how you have success in a son of a season.

[17:26] So, you get that little rock in the bottom of your throat, if you have a rock, it’s got So the relevance of the contemporary debate and conclusion is that it’s really much ado about nothing. You know, they make this big deal of these arguments, and I have a stack of articles this thick that discusses transcendental arguments. And you get down to it, and that’s all that they’re purporting to do. Even the strongest ones that Grayling tries to put together, they don’t work, I don’t believe. But even if they did work, big deal. They don’t tie experience together.

[18:03] They say, here’s one experience. Here’s one concept that we need to have. Over here, here’s another concept. What’s the relationship between them? They can’t give an account for their relationship, and they can’t give an account for how we can even reason transcendentally. So all this is to say is the contemporary debate, although it’s interesting and it’s sometimes exasperating, and I’m a philosopher, I enjoyed reading through it, but the bottom line is it doesn’t have much relevance to Cornelius Van Til’s transcendental arguments, except that these are examples of what transcendental arguments, what true transcendental arguments are not like. These are really wimpy arguments, and Cornelius Van Til’s arguments are going to be able to account for all the type of stuff that we’ve been talking about and, plus, be able to tie it together.

[18:51] Okay, I think time’s almost out. Time for one or two questions. I don’t know any sailors that they were in the position that was really the first alternative to fix their boat up to sea, as you look at the first and the last thing to fix their boat up to sea. And it seems like the philosophy was so caught up in all of the philosophical lives, they don’t even put it in some sort of reality, really. philosophers today consider themselves on a vastly with no dry docking potential you can’t ever dry dock well but they’re autonomous they couldn’t dock they have no place to go to Well, that’s a good point.

[19:58] The irony of this all is that the ship on which they are sailing, the only reason it stays afloat is because of God’s grace and because that God is the one who provides them the conditions for experience, and yet they suppress that. If they ever tried to say that what binds them together is the fact that they’re all next to it. No. Well, I can’t imagine them even trying that. I’d say go ahead and try it. We’ll see what you’ve got. I mean, it’s not going to work. I’d have to see how they did it. But once they did it, it wouldn’t be difficult at all to prepare the part.

[20:39] I want to thank Mike Butler for his hard work in preparing to boil all this difficult contemporary material down for you. Even though at the end, Mike said it’s much ado about nothing And from our standpoint, from wanting to get some concrete, positive stuff out of the philosophers He’s right, it is much ado about nothing It’s helpful for us to have some idea of the back and forth or the rocky terrain When it comes to transcendental analysis and argumentation Because already we see critics of Van Til beginning to reflect elements of whether they’ve read the critics of transcendental arguments in the philosophical journals or not, the same sorts of arguments start getting directed at Van Til’s apologetic.

[21:28] Tomorrow, when I get around to responding to the major criticisms of Van Til on this point, one of them is, at best, Van Til leaves us with a hypothetical argument. If this, then you need to have the Christian worldview. But the if is there all the time. And as you can see, that’s one of the major things that comes up in the journals as well.

[21:48] Another criticism that has been made, whether it’s right or wrong, is that transcendental arguments are no big deal. They’re not unique. There’s not really a separate category of transcendental argument. Well, as we were saying at the break, some of you already know this, John Frame essentially uses that as a criticism of Van Til. He’s really not giving us anything unique here. And so I think though the autonomous philosophers are much ado about nothing And Van Til’s approach to transcendental arguments is going to be somewhat different than what they are doing I still think that it was really valuable for you to be exposed to what Mike’s been working on in his master’s degree And hope that that’ll be finished this summer, right, Lynn?

[22:31] Before I go over the sheet that I’ve passed out to you that summarizes transcendental interpretation and argumentation I thought it’d be good to reflect for a few minutes in a meandering way about the skeptic, because as we said yesterday, these different kinds of epistemologies and different kinds of arguments are all aimed at, in one way, eventually answering the skeptic. Yesterday, I said there are foundational responses to skepticism that say there’s certain unassailable foundations to our thinking. They may be conceptual or logical. They may be perceptual. they may be matters of common sense. Another approach to skepticism is the pragmatic approach. You know, we use the model of science because it’s the most fruitful, it’s the most successful in accomplishing our ends. And then there’s the transcendental approach to skepticism. And as Michael is going over in our seminar today, modern transcendental arguments are all directed at an attempt to answer the skeptic. I’ve written a sentence on the board for you to consider, It’s a famous specimen in 20th century philosophy and leads to a lot of different discussions and applications. But what it says is this sentence is false.

[23:47] This sentence is false. Now, what do you make of it? If someone were to come up to you and offer that, I mean, I can’t even give you a contrived scenario where something like that would be said. But imagine somebody said to you, what I’m saying right now is false. Now, how would you reply to that? You’d say, well, doesn’t it have to first be true in order to be asserted as false? In which case, it couldn’t be false. Haven’t you just refuted yourself? Or what if you just, no, I haven’t refuted myself. This sentence is false. You’d say, well, I’m not so sure I can even make sense of what you’re saying there. Because you’ve either refuted yourself or this is nonsense.

[24:25] And in contemporary epistemology and philosophy of language, This specimen is used to show that sometimes when we are engaged in self-reference, we have to iterate our beliefs or we have to go to a different level of linguistic analysis so that we have an object language and the language in terms of which we evaluate the object language. So this sentence is false can only be meaningful actually in another language that is in a language reflecting on this language. We’re not going to get into all that. I’m going to use this, though, by way of analogy.

[25:01] What if the skeptic asserts, my challenge to any rational justification is not rationally justified? The skeptic says, I don’t think there is any rational justification. Ultimately, rationality can’t be justified. And I say, well, is what you’re saying, when you claim that, when you say there is no rational justification for rationality, is that rationally justified? And the skeptic would have to say no, right? But now when he says no, it is not rationally justified when I challenge the idea that there’s rational justification. Hasn’t he ended up saying something like this sentence is false? I’m not now engaged in a discussion of meaning bearers and reference and language and all that. I’m asking about this whole notion of justification.

[25:51] When somebody says you can’t justify rationality, and what I’m saying is not rationally justified, don’t we have the right to say oh well then we can ignore you somebody says here’s what i’m saying and i mean it with all my heart and it’s false you say well if we take you at your word it’s false and so you know let’s get on to the next candidate you’re wasting our time the problem with the skeptic is he doesn’t really want to be a skeptic he wants to say what i’m saying is false well really what i’m saying isn’t rationally justified either and what i’m saying is there is no rational justification for anything, we can say, okay, well then, since that’s not rationally justified, if we’re going to have a rational debate, we can ignore you. And the problem is, the skeptic says, you can’t ignore me, you can’t ignore me, I’m going to keep asserting this, you haven’t answered me yet. We say, you don’t need an answer, because what you’re saying is not rationally justified.

[26:44] The reason I’m playing this little skid out for you, or writing out the scenario, is that in apologetics, in essence, we’re saying, if you want to play the reason-giving game, you’re going to have to be a Christian. But I can’t force you to play that game, and nor can I force you to keep coming in and out of the game. I mean, I can’t force you or can’t prevent you from playing your own little game of stepping into the arena, then stepping out, stepping into the arena, stepping out. Essentially, the skeptic wants to say, I don’t know that you can justify anything, so I can’t justify what I’m saying when I say you can’t justify anything. You say, okay, fine.

[27:20] but you’re not in the reason giving game now anybody else want to play reason giving anybody else want to argue you know so you can’t ignore me i said what you’re making yourself ignorable you’re ignorable because every time you assert your position you have to if you’re consistent deny your position and so when you deny your position then we say get out of here we want to talk to people who want to argue and use reasons and so forth you follow what i’m getting at now some people would say well if you’re apologetic comes down to that you haven’t answered this guy says you know what he keeps coming in the door saying you didn’t answer me you didn’t answer me i’ll say well let me tell you something in apologetics apologetics by definition is only interested to people who play the reason-giving game and so if the skeptic position is i’m not going to play that game i say well then i can’t do apologetics with you is that any defect in my system of apologetics that i can’t make everybody play no that’d be like saying Michael Jordan’s not a very good basketball player because there are some people who refuse to get on the court with him. That’s because he can’t defeat them. Wouldn’t that be unexcured? But now, so when somebody says to a transcendental presuppositional apologist, well, but the skeptic, you see, he can keep saying, you haven’t answered me, you haven’t answered me, because maybe there’s no connection between what you consider rationally necessary and the real world i can say well you either have to have a rational justification for saying that or you’re not playing the game now if you want to get off the basketball court our point is we can beat anybody who wants to get on the court but if you don’t want to get on the court don’t get on the court it’s no defect in my basketball playing that you refuse to play something else about skepticism in my meandering thought i want you to imagine two different ways of picturing ourselves as knowers one says god created us and our minds and god also created the world that we know with our mind so this may not be the greatest but i’ll try to diagram it for you so what i have here is god above the mind of man and the world and god is the creator that’s why i’ve made these arrows he’s the cause of the human mind and the way it operates he’s also the cause of what we’ll call in the broadest sense the world. The world includes the human mind, so I want to make that clear. But we’ll call that whatever the objects of knowledge are. And that’s a Christian view of the situation. We believe that God made the mind and the objects that the mind knows.

[30:01] And therefore, our conceptual scheme is automatically in touch, automatically corresponds to the object of experience, doesn’t it? On this presupposition. I’m not saying it has to be that way, but I’m saying if this is your beginning outlook, if this is your perspective, then you already begin with the idea that our conceptual scheme or the human mind and the way it works is in connection with the objects of knowledge and what is the connecting link? God.

[30:35] I realize that some philosophers will just poo-poo this and say, you’re doing theology. So they say, okay, fine, but if you won’t do theology with me, I want you to see what happens to your philosophy. Another approach, unlike this one, says we can’t know anything about God at the outset. All we can know is that we have a human mind, and we assume it’s sufficiency. That’s a real blatant, arrogant assumption, but we assume the sufficiency of the mind, and we’re pretty sure that there are objects out there that the mind can know.

[31:09] And so you have everything loose and disjointed or random. The objects of knowledge are not connected to one another by God’s creative and sovereign foreordaining work, nor are the objects connected automatically to the mind of man and his conceptual scheme. In fact, all minds are loose and separate as well. And God’s not brought into the picture here because, after all, you wouldn’t want to do theology in the place of doing philosophy. So we’ll just do philosophy autonomously. We’ll begin with man, and then we’ll work out for man.

[31:45] Now, the mind of man uses a certain conceptual scheme. The skeptic comes along and says, how do you know there’s a connection between your conceptual scheme and the objects in the world? Well, by definition, this worldview cannot answer the skeptic. Because it begins with what? A separation between the mind and the objects in the world. There’s no connecting link. And so any attempt to devise a connecting link is going to be easily criticizable by the skeptic. You follow what I’m getting at? If your beginning assumption is, we don’t bring God into the picture, you have minds, you have objects, you’re going to have the problem the skeptic’s pushing you to. You don’t know the connection between your mind and the object.

[32:32] So we call it the egocentric predicament. You have an egocentric philosophy, don’t be surprised that it ends with the egocentric predicament. Begin with man, and don’t bring God into the picture, and guess what you’ll end up with? Man separated from everything. How do you know there’s any connection between your thinking and what’s outside your mind? Actually, the skeptic can push you even harder and say, how can you be sure there is anything outside your mind? It’s not just the question, are there objects corresponding to our conceptual scheme? Now the problem is, are there even objects?

[33:06] Now, what’s the name of that school of thought that says, we have no reason to say there’s anything outside my own experience? Solipsism. Autonomous philosophy, which says we don’t want to bring God into the picture, if pushed hard enough, becomes solipsistic. Now, I don’t know, I haven’t run into any who are willing to be solipsistic, but they don’t really have an answer to the skeptic. Notice what else the skeptic can do.

[33:31] If you begin with your own individual mind, as Michael Butler was pointing out at another point, you have a whole question of other minds. How can you be sure there are other minds that you’re connected to? You can’t be sure there are objects outside your mind. You can’t be sure there’s other minds outside your mind. And so when the skeptic raises the question, how can you be sure your conceptual scheme corresponds to the world?

[33:58] our answer as Christians is that’s our presupposition. That’s the picture we begin with. We don’t face the problem that you’re raising. But your problem is a real good one for these people who start with man all by himself without God in the picture. So those people who want to do God-less philosophy, they don’t think they’re doing anti-God philosophy, but they just want to think you have to bring God into the picture, then of course you’re on very good grounds to go pushing them but then as a skeptic you’re not on very good grounds at all because as we just saw if you say there’s no rational justification for what you’re saying when you say there’s no rational justification we can dismiss you too and so what you have here are three possibilities well i’m not altogether happy with this scheme but to make my point here you can be a skeptic in which case you can be dismissed if you want to argue rationally the skeptic can be to Smith. Because he’s essentially saying I don’t want to play the rationality game.

[34:58] We say, okay, fine. Well, since that’s what we’re doing on the court today, we’re playing basketball. Do you want to play basketball? But don’t stand off the court saying, you can’t defeat me. You can’t defeat me. We said, well, of course we can’t. You don’t want to step on the court. You said you didn’t want to play the game? What I’m saying is he’s being hypocritical. And he says, I want to argue with you. But basically, I don’t want to argue. I want to play the game. It’s kind of like I want to taunt you. Yes, Michael Jordan, I could beat you at basketball, but I’m not going to get on the court.

[35:33] What he wants to do is he wants to, in essence, I mean, I’ve overgeneralized in my metaphor, but he wants to criticize all these other attempts, and then he wants to conclude there is no justification for rationality. And we say, what’s your justification for saying there’s no justification? That’s right. We’re saying, in order to do that, you’re going to have to play basketball. In order to assert that, you’re going to have to be rational. In which case, you’re going to be saying this sentence is false. Right. Right. Provides him a meaningful…

[36:10] No, to say there’s a meaningful ground for meaninglessness is to say this sentence is false. That’s what he’s asserting. That’s what he’s asserting. He’s saying that meaning has a meaningless foundation. Yeah, well, that’s like saying this sentence that I assert, thereby implying that it’s true, is asserted to be false.

[36:33] the skeptic doesn’t have to be taken seriously in terms of the game of giving reason but he may say i don’t want to play the game we say well if you want to play the game stay off the court then the other alternative is this autonomous picture of the knower as self-sufficient he’s in this world and now we have to work out from ourselves to other minds to objects and so forth but he has no assurance we can use the skeptic’s arguments better than the skeptic he has no assurance that his conceptual scheme ever has any contact with the objects outside the mind and then you have the option of starting with the christian worldview and you start with the christian worldview somebody says well how do you know that the mind is in contact with objects that the conceptual scheme corresponds to objects they say well that by definition is my worldview that’s what i start with now i realize people say oh you’re begging the question i’m not begging the question. That’s my worldview. Now, do you want to play on my court or do you want to get off the court? That was the punchline. Hopefully you understand what I’m getting at. It’s that anybody who wants to challenge us is going to be reduced to skepticism. We’ve already indicated the skeptics got to get off the court. But I understand the problem. I understand that you can’t get the mind, the conceptual scheme to correspond. If somebody says, well, look, this is necessary to our conceptual schemes, in an autonomous framework, you’d say, well, yeah, but that doesn’t show that it’s true. That doesn’t show that it corresponds to the objects in the world, that reality really is that way. That is, as Van Til puts it, nothing more but a rock in a bottomless ocean. You haven’t done anything to help us get in contact with reality. But within the Christian framework of thought we can say that’s our presupposition. Not only can we show that rationality is justified in terms of God’s existence and man being made in his image but if you take that picture you’ve already overcome the egocentric predicament because there is no egocentric predicament if you’re a creationist.

[38:43] Certainly there’s a problem not the one who recognizes who is definitely didn’t ever know it But in a sense, it’s asking, you’re saying, I don’t want to play basketball. I’d rather play baseball. But Clayton doesn’t realize that you’ve still got to play by the rules of basketball. But really, the analogy that we’re reading, there really is only one thing. Yeah, in the reason giving. So they’re going to say, come over and let’s play baseball. But really, they have to have the same rules. Well, they’re really playing basketball by a different way. Yeah, I mean, whenever we use these analogies, they eventually have.

[39:16] All I’m getting at is, what I’m saying is, basketball is the reason-given game. If somebody says he wants to play another game, the point is, it has nothing to do with reason-given. Yeah, what I’m saying is, if you don’t want to play basketball, you’re right. I don’t have anything else to offer you but basketball.

[39:41] But the problem with you, Mr. Unbeliever, is that you want to play basketball, but you’re no better than the skeptic who says they don’t want to play basketball. Because given your picture, you never can have any reason to think that your conceptual scheme matches the objects in the world. So I can’t give you a reason within your framework. Your framework already assumes that separation. My framework says there is no such separation. It cannot be any such separation. Say what?

[40:13] Yeah, the self-conscious skeptic, that is what skepticism is. There is no rational justification for rationality. Yeah, what they’re arguing is, I assert this sentence that it’s false. But the act of asserting a sentence is to assert that it’s true. So they’re already involved in this dialectical tension at the very outset.

[40:49] So you have those who are self-conscious skeptics, and then you have those who think that they aren’t skeptics, but because they begin with this point of view are reduced to skepticism. And then you have those who don’t begin with this point of view, and they say, the skeptic can’t touch me. If you want to play basketball, if you want to play the reason-giving game, you’ve got to be a Christian. If you are a Christian, the skeptics’ assault are meaningless.

[41:13] I mean, they don’t hurt us They’re not devastated Yeah, because God created everything And he created man as his image So that the fundamental biblical picture Of what this world is, who we are What our place in the cosmos is already says we’re in contact by our minds with the world that God created, because God created our minds to know that world, imaging him. A little louder.

[42:00] In Acts 17, to answer the question, you actually see, after he dismisses their unknown God, the problem with their systemology, Right. None of us are far from him. In him we live and move and have our being. When somebody says, well, now, how do you know that? I say, the answer is you couldn’t know anything if you didn’t know that. He says, okay, well, maybe we don’t know anything. And I say, well, then get off the court. Why are you arguing with me if we don’t know anything? The assumption of standing on the court is you want to give reasons. If you’re telling me you can’t give reasons, then I say, true to Lou.

[42:43] Okay, I know that every metaphor or every analogy does break down, but I just want to make it easy for you to see the apologetical significance of what we’re talking about here. Okay, let’s, apart from Dr. Bahnsen’s meandering about skepticism, that’s what you put in your outline. Dr. Bahnsen now meanders. He seems riled up about these skeptics. Says very harsh things about them.

[43:09] we move on the next point here is to summarize transcendental method and its usefulness this is what we’ll do till the end of today’s session and then lord willing when we gather tomorrow i’m going to begin looking at van till specifically to show that he was a transcendentalist in his apologetic method and we’ll see how he did that and i want you to see we’ve already hinted at it So the punch has been taken away. But I want you to see that Van Til has a unique way of doing transcendental argumentation. He says, I’m going to argue worldviews, not just little pieces of whether there’s a mind in contact with objects or individuals or different from other individual minds or anything like that. So forth and so on. We’ll look at that. And then we’ll look finally at the criticisms of transcendental apologetics that have been offered.

[44:00] and my intention is to end our seminar before we go out and eat together to go all the way back and say i can now tell this to you at a child level we’ve been sounding really philosophical i know but one of the things that to me personally this is only a testimony it doesn’t mean it’s right but for me personally really hit hard that the power of what dan hill is doing is that children can do this and PhDs in philosophy can do it. And so I want to end on that note to show you how children can use the transcendental argument. They probably aren’t going to call it that. Okay. Now then. Call this the margin of transcendental.

[44:43] Yeah, what I’m doing here is I’m summarizing, Dan, what we’ve learned about this general idea of transcendental reasoning and its value for apologetics. If I can summarize where we have been, I started with the notion of proof, claiming that there’s an object of proof for God’s existence. There’s other different kinds of proofs, right? Rational, empirical, pragmatic, transcendental. Ooh, what’s that? And we said, and guess what? That’s what Van Til’s doing.

[45:07] And I illustrated that simply and then went back to his earliest publication to show, using the technical language, this is what he set out to do in his career, present a transcendental argument for God’s existence. And then we put this in historical context. And really, everything that we did from that point on through what Mike Butler has given us has been to introduce you historically to transcendental argument. We first look at Kant in his context, how he introduces transcendental analysis as a way of getting beyond rationalism and empiricism. And then we looked at contemporary epistemology. In general, I said there are ways of doing epistemology. You have the skeptic who is answered by the foundationalist, by the pragmatist, or the transcendentalist. And then Mike came and has given us a good day’s introduction to contemporary transcendental arguments.

[46:00] So you’re now familiar with this notion of transcendental reasoning that’s been put in historical context, and you’d even have me come and tell you, I don’t like skepticism very much, and here’s why. But now I want to summarize what transcendental arguments are all about, why they’re valuable, and we’ll look at them specifically in the case of Van Til tomorrow. Let me begin with a quotation from David Hume. Again, we’re thinking about the skeptic’s challenge. And Hume says, I love this sentence, one of the best ones in all of his writings.

[46:32] Hume says, if reason be considered in an abstract view, it furnishes invincible arguments against itself. Now, what is reasoning for an empiricist? John Locke said to use the plain historical method of reasoning. Say what? Okay, you’re answering another question. That’s a good answer to that question. But what I’m getting at is how did Locke look upon the process of reasoning?

[47:03] When he used the concept reason, he said that he was using the historical plain method, meaning to trace the history of our ideas. He does psychology, cognitive psychology. And for something to be true, all of its component parts must be able to be analyzed simply to some kind of observation. That’s reasoning, if you’re an empiricist. No innate ideas. Don’t beg any questions. There’s just particular experiences, and everything that’s true must be built up from particular observations of the world.

[47:38] Now, Hume comes along first, but now if reasoning be considered in the abstract, If you generalize this, that to know anything, to reason at all, you must trace it to its particular observational components, then reasoning furnishes invincible arguments against itself. Hume saying empiricism refutes itself because the empiricist cannot give observational components of genetic, psychological, historical tracing of observational components for the claims being made about continuing substance, causality, so forth in this world. We can’t say that there’s a knower. We can’t say that there are objects in the world that continue to be known, nor that there’s any causal relationship between them. So reason, when we generalize, when we make reason be fair according to its own rules, live up to its own standards, fails to do so. And that ends in skepticism. Very good. Everything reduces the subjectivism, the egocentric predicament, and skepticism.

[48:47] and that’s exactly what happened in the 19th century not that there weren’t I mean you have to get my tape for 19th century philosophy to get to the broader picture but a very heavy strain in philosophy in response to him’s skepticism was to move in to nihilism romanticism which says you can’t trust reason anyway what a piddly thing the hobgoblin the little mind we’ve got to let our feelings you know and get in touch with nature and that sort of thing and even worse you have those who say well all you do is you have the individual asserting or you have no values at all God is dead therefore man has to assert his own godship over his experience. I think he’s off the run. Reason undermined what was going to be the age of reason. I mean, that is such a heavy apologetical commentary on philosophy in itself.

[49:57] Okay, Kant is scandalized by the situation. And so here’s his transcendental program. To quote him, it still remains a scandal to philosophy and to human reason in general that the existence of things outside us must be accepted merely on faith and that if anyone thinks good to doubt their existence we are unable to counter his doubt by any satisfactory proof. They say, well Emmanuel, what kind of proof could we possibly use to counter that? We don’t want to be hideous where we just say it’s a matter of faith how can you prove that there’s an external world that corresponds to the mind?

[50:39] Another quotation from Kant, I entitle transcendental, all knowledge which is occupied not so much with objects as with the mode of our knowledge of objects, insofar as this mode of knowledge is to be possible a priori. So, transcendental knowledge is knowledge of the mode of knowing, the mode of our knowledge of objects insofar as this mode of knowing is a priori possible. If thinking in this way is a priori possible, how is that?

[51:19] And he says, as again Mike has explained to you, it’s because I come to the objects of knowledge imposing these categories on them. I’m going to think causally. I must think causally. Anything that goes through my mind go through the filter of causal reasoning. So that’s his notion of transcendental argumentation.

[51:40] Now, looking up on the board, does Kant then bridge the gap between conceptual schemes and objects outside the mind? No, in fact, he just poured cement around his feet, didn’t he? He can’t get out of that. His whole point is the mind is such that you can’t ever know anything outside the mind. There is no Ding-on-Zick thing in itself. There is no reality outside the mind that I can rationally know, because to rationally understand anything is to have my mind form it. So Kant has a transcendental program, but it’s a program that’s going to be caught in that same autonomous web. His worldview, his presuppositions will destroy him.

[52:22] And then another thing he said about transcendental argument that’s important, he said the conclusion of a transcendental argument quote should be entitled a principle not a theorem because it has the peculiar character that it makes possible the very experience which is its own ground of proof and that in this experience it must always itself be presupposed okay we learn a couple of things from this quotation first of all Kant didn’t think you could use transcendental arguments to prove specific points of information about the world or experience. So if you want to know whether aspirin or Advil works better for a particular kind of pain, transcendental argument can’t tell you that. It can’t tell you a point of history. It can’t give you any specific scientific theorem. It’s unintended to do that.

[53:20] Rather, the transcendental argument provides a principle in terms of which any answer that’s offered to those questions can make sense. And indeed, and this is important, Kant points out that the conclusion of a transcendental argument or the experience itself already presupposes the transcendental. So when we’re talking about transcendentals, we’re assuming the transcendentals when we talk about them. And at the end of the Grayling article, he reflects on that, and I think well, when he says that if a conceptual scheme is transcendentally necessary, then you need to use it even when you talk about itself.

[54:01] Many critics of Van Til, at this point you can appreciate the naivete and how off-base they are, many critics of Van Til have said when he calls presuppositional argument circular, that he’s banking the question. well now would anybody suggest that Mr. Grayling is somehow a philosophical boob how silly can you be Dr. Grayling if you say that we have to assume this conceptual scheme when we talk about this conceptual scheme you’re reasoning in a circle that’s vicious that’s a logical fallacy we can dismiss you now he’s saying something very profound you might agree or disagree with it, but it’s not a schoolboy mistake in logic, nor was it for Van Til. What Van Til said is, if what I’m arguing is true about Christianity being the presupposition of all intelligibility, then you’ve got to presuppose Christianity even when you argue about Christianity. And that, you see, is the strength of the proof.

[55:04] It’s that I can’t talk about it without assuming it, and you can’t talk against it without out assuming it. And so let’s look at the summary of transcendental method for apologetics here.

[55:16] In a sense, when somebody says, well, what are you getting at when you talk about a transcendental argument? The next two lines tell you what the argument looks like in its broadest form. Take P, show that Q is the precondition of P. That’s the argument. Now I’m going to say more about it, but just make sure you understand that that’s how simple it is. Take anything, P, and then show that Q is the precondition of P. I am not arguing take P and then deductively conclude Q, nor am I saying take P and a lot of things analogous to P and inductively say very generally Q. This is not a deductive argument. This is not an inductive argument. This is an argument that says, what has to be true? What is the precondition for P? Now, in more detail, when I say take P, I’m referring, jump the word undoubted, I’ll come back to it, to some general principle. Take any general principle, or if you don’t like that approach, take any operational feature of experience or thinking. A general principle would be every event has a cause.

[56:32] No proposition can be true if its opposite is true. Opposite’s not the technical term, but contradictory propositions can’t both be true. Now, take any principle, the transcendental argument says, and then perform the next step. Show that Q is the precondition of that principle.

[56:52] Or, maybe even easier to see, take any operational feature of experience or thinking. What’s an operational feature? Because we talk in abstract terms, people think it’s real heavy-duty stuff. When people argue with each other, they’re going through certain acts, aren’t they? They’re operating in a certain way. They’re using language. They’re reasoning. Their minds are going from one premise to another. Take any operational feature of experience or thinking. Okay?

[57:21] So notice how wide and general the scope of a transcendental argument is. Mike Butler had suggested to you in his exposition today that a transcendental argument has got to be something that’s not like pool table or the game of pool. It’s got to be something that is so situated in our conceptual scheme, so central or close to the center, that it has wide-ranging impact. Another way of putting that in philosophical terms is that it’s systematically fundamental or systematically applicable. because it is so close to the center of the web of beliefs, it touches just about everything else we do. So the principle of causation, the laws of logic, the notion of personal identity, those sorts of things would be principle. Or you can take the way we operate in the world. The fact that somebody says, if the milkman’s going to know not to leave eggs, tonight I have to leave him a note. That doesn’t seem very profound.

[58:25] but that operation within the realm of experience itself would make no sense why would you leave the milkman a note if you didn’t assume that there’s some causal connections within the world that minds could communicate with each other that the words on the page provided he’s an english speaker could communicate to him and so forth so the first step in a transcendental argument is to take p whether it’s a general principle or an operational feature of your experience or your thinking and now show that Q is the precondition of P, which is to say that Q is necessary to explain the possibility of P. Another way of putting this, I’m just giving different languages, show that Q is presupposed by P. Not that it’s deduced from P, not that it’s induced from P and analogous Qs, but that it’s the presupposition of P. And how would you do that? How can we show that Q is presupposed by peace? Now, in our case, Q is going to be the Christian worldview.

[59:29] So when we do apologetics, we don’t have to start with miracles or angels or fear of death or anything. We start with anything. Start with leaving a note for the milkman. Start with, you know, science trying to show what the cause of cancer is. Start with the laws of logic. Start with anything you want. and what we want to show is if you didn’t have the Christian worldview you wouldn’t be able to show that T was possible how would you demonstrate that?

[59:55] I’m going to give you two methods here one I call the indirect method the other the dilemma method and some of you sharper logicians will actually point out they’re one and the same it’s a different version but that’s okay I think you’d like the variety approach and so I’ll give it to you two ways one, the indirect method says, not Q, Q is the Christian worldview. That’s what we’re going to show is presupposed by P. Here’s my argument. Not Q implies an absurdity or renders the operational feature impossible. Not Q. If you deny the Christian worldview through a series of considerations, it doesn’t have to be just two steps to it, but not Q would imply an absurdity or alternatively would contradict, would lead to a contradiction of P, which is undoubted.

[60:50] Now, having said that, I’ve got to go back to my tape P and tell you why I put the word undoubted in there. When we argue, we start with something that is not doubted. Notice I didn’t say something indubitable. I could have. I was tempted to make this a richer presentation, but then it would become more complicated. The point is, when I argue with somebody, I’m going to start with something that he doesn’t doubt, something about his experience, about his thinking, some general principle. I’m not going to try to have the foundation of my argument or my debate, some kind of platform that’s wobbly. I’m going to say, give me something that you aren’t going to have any question about. I mean, you take for granted. What is your given? Everybody has one, except who?

[61:43] Maybe the skeptic. But what’s the problem with the skeptic? What if he says, well, the only thing I can give you is there is no rational justification for rationality. I say, I’ll take it. Thank you. That’s what you know for sure, right? Now, he might say, no, I didn’t say I know it. And I say, well, but you’re asserting it, right? Well, asserting and affirming is the same thing. Yeah. But you see, the point is he hands me something that he’s not doubting. Granted, in doing it, he stepped on the basketball court, and now I’m going to slam Duncan, all right?

[62:13] The best thing for the non-Christian to do, to be very honest with you, is to say, I’m not going to get involved in this. I’m not going to say anything. Just turn around and walk off the court, but give me something that you don’t doubt. Even if it is, everything is doubtable. That sentence, when you assert that sentence, I’ll take it. That’s the beauty. That’s how wide-ranging this thing is. Any pea. But the point is, it’s not a wobbly pea. It’s not an uncertain thing.

[62:39] It’s got to be something that the person you’re talking to takes for granted. And everybody does. There aren’t many really self-conscious skeptics in this world. Okay? So you’re talking to your neighbor. Your neighbor assumes that science is, what, operating on a secure foundation. The person believes there is a connection between what I see and the way the world really is. Most people are naive realists, and I think that’s fine.

[63:06] They should be, because with being made in the image of God, they should assume the world they experience is very much the way they think about it, because God made us that way. But my point here is make sure you deal with whoever it is you’re dealing with. It’s something they’re not going to come back and say, oh, well, I doubt that.

[63:22] So take what is some undoubted principle or operational feature, and then show that if you deny the Christian worldview, you either have an absurdity or you’re led to contradict the P which you didn’t have any doubt about. Or you render the operational feature that you’re talking about, scientific methodology, assuming that there are real objects out there, you render that feature impossible. The feature might have been just asserting P or knowing P. You start with the unbeliever and say, what do you know? What are you willing to assert? And then from that, you show that the Christian worldview, if denied, if you deny the Christian worldview, that operational feature is either impossible or the principle that you’ve been talking, excuse me, or the P that you’ve taken for granted is in fact false. Can’t know it. That’s called the indirect method. It’s proving it indirectly because you take the opposite position and show that it creates this intellectual difficulty. And since none of us want that intellectual difficulty, we want to assert P, or we want to have this operation, or we want to have this principle, then we’ve shown that the Christian worldview is necessary to what you already know or what you’re thinking.

[64:42] Now, the dilemma method, this is a little more sophisticated in terms of your philosophical outlook. But the dilemma method says, take P here and show that it implies Q and show that the denial of P implies Q as well. Okay. What if somebody says that adding insulation to your attic will lower your fuel bill? I say, okay, if that’s true, that implies that God exists. Now, the argument is not just the assertion that I gave you. It’s going to be a long set of considerations, but basically, if we don’t live in an orderly universe where what we’ve experienced in the past is the basis for predictions about the future, then you couldn’t make this kind of claim predicting about the future. But now here’s the interesting thing about a transcendental argument. What did Kant say? The conclusion of a transcendental argument is not a particular theorem. It’s a principle for understanding all theorems.

[65:44] And so now what I’ll say to the unbeliever is, well, and the interesting thing about this is, I can take the opposite of P and show that it proves God exists too. If it is true that adding fuel, adding insulation to your attic will not lower your fuel bill, that’s because God exists. For you to know that or assert that, once again, you have to have causation, you have to have induction, you have to have observation and so forth. So I’m not trying to argue about fuel bills or insulation in your attic. I’m saying any argument, whichever way you go, is going to imply the existence of God.

[66:23] P implies Q, and not P implies Q, but it must be true that P are not P. It’s one or the other. Therefore, Q must be true, which is really a long, quasi-fancy way of saying you’ve got to believe in God in order to prove anything. It’s a principle, the Christian worldview, the Christian God, is a principle that makes intelligible arguments for specific conclusions or theorems. Yeah, you’re demonstrating that the transcendental procedure is talking about the precondition of all intelligibility, whether it’s about your fuel bill going up or down.

[67:07] Now, here’s the interesting thing about dilemma. Let me say this real quick before I forget to put it in there. What if somebody says, well, what if P is God doesn’t exist? Van Til says, okay. Or let’s say P is God exists and not P is God does not exist.

[67:26] Van Til says, you want to show that, this is the easy part, if God exists, that implies that God exists. No problem. Everybody says, that’s wonderful. However, and this is the fascinating thing, if you argue not P, that also implies that God exists.

[67:45] At one point, Van Til summarizes what he’s getting at when he says, anti-theism presupposes theism. Not P wouldn’t be intelligible unless P were true. Now, do you see why this is such a strong approach to apologetics? You don’t have to worry about whatever a person has out there.

[68:06] Take any experience about fuel bills, about the cause of cancer, about a historical fact, about miracles, and take any point of view you want to argue, even the atheistic point of view. And the transcendental argument says, to argue that point, you have presupposed God. That’s right.

[68:30] Van Til many times says, any statement, any fact, can be used to prove the existence of God. Now, he may be wrong. I don’t think he is. I think it’s just brilliant. But you have to understand, that’s what his program is. That’s what he’s attempting to lay out for us.

[68:45] It doesn’t prove the discovery, it proves the innate knowledge that we have within us, that we make that sense. Right, and the Christian worldview gets into that further by explaining why we’re in touch with objects because we’re made by God, made to know Him, and so forth.

[69:02] But real quickly here before time runs out on our tape for today, I’d like to finally point out that the transcendental method is useful on either interpretation of transcendental arguments, either the conceptual or the existential, what might call the ontological interpretation of the argument. On the conceptual transcendental interpretation of the results of what you’ve just been doing, what we say is, if you wish to argue at all, alternatively, to use predication, language, to reason, to make sense of experience, whatever, if you wish to argue at all, then you must presuppose the existence of the Christian worldview or God to make sense of your own argument or communicating it.

[69:51] And here the word must is interpreted psychologically. If you want to reason, to make sense of your reasoning, you must psychologically presuppose the Christian worldview. Now, that’s not the strongest form of a transcendental argument. That’s not the strongest interpretation of the result, I grant you. But you know, if that’s all we have with what Vantel is giving us, we’ve got enough, don’t we?

[70:16] Because basically, what I’m saying to the person who argues with me is, Well, if you want to argue with me, you have to assume that you’re wrong. I mean, not right out, but through our discussion, what I want to point out to you is that you’re assuming the very thing you’re arguing against. Even if that’s only a psychological remark, that you must do that, that our conceptual scheme requires it, remember, what are we doing in apologetics? We’re only dealing with those who want to play basketball. I mean, reason giving. So we’re going to say, if you want to engage in reason giving, you’re going to have to assume that I’m right.

[70:49] The stronger interpretation, the existential interpretation, says if you wish to give an account of our ability to know anything or argue, use predication, reason, make sense out of experience, then your explanation must presuppose the existence of the Christian worldview. Here the must is not the psychological must. You can’t escape thinking about the Christian God when you argue the way that you are.

[71:15] now we’re saying that your explanation of our ability must include, necessarily includes, a reference to the Christian worldview. There’s no way to explain, to materially account for our ability to know things unless you make a reference to the Christian worldview. In fact, many references to the Christian worldview. So you have two interpretations, and all I’m going to get at is, I think that the existential is the stronger and is legitimate. But even if somebody said, well, all you’re showing is that we’ve got to think as Christians, they’ll say, I’ll take it. That’s pretty good to tell people if you’re going to think at all, you’ve got to think as a Christian. See you tomorrow. Thank you.