[00:00.000] I had given an extended illustration of how every event or everything is evidence for God’s existence. And I said, the flower growing in the garden is evidence for God’s existence. And what do I have? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven different ways in which the flower growing in the garden is evidence for God’s existence over against atheism. And I’m just going to read what I had put down here in the book for you.
[00:26.860] One, atheism cannot explain the origin of the flower growing in the garden in the sense that it can’t make sense out of the materials of which the flower is made. Where did they come from? How did they get here? How does the Big Bang, you know, how do we get to dirt and to chloroform and all the other sources? It can’t really explain the origin of the flower. Atheism cannot explain its history and development. Okay, so it can’t explain matter and its characteristics. Now it can’t explain induction, history and development of flower.
[01:05.480] Thirdly, atheism cannot explain its conceptual relations. That is the logic that we use when we talk about the flower and what it is to have a universal of flower or universal of dirtness or whatever it may be. Because atheism can’t explain universals. Atheism cannot explain matter and its origin. It can’t explain induction. It can’t explain logic. It can’t explain universals.
[01:30.540] Fourthly, atheism cannot explain the value judgements we have about the flower. It can’t explain aesthetics or ethical values as to what we’re supposed to do about the flower. As a Christian, I say the beauty of that flower puts me into moral obligation to praise the God who made it. Atheists can’t explain. Somebody else might say, that flower is such that I can stomp on it. They say, well, ethical system you have, the point is you can’t explain ethics at all if you’re an atheist.
[02:01.740] Next, atheism cannot explain its adaptation to the environment or the flower’s adaptation to our purposes. That is, how is it the flower works in a certain ecological system? Why is there any relationship of anything to anything else in the natural world? And even tougher, why is there any way in, how is it possible that things outside of me can be made suitable to my purposes? Atheism cannot explain why explanation is called for or surmount skepticism regarding what we know about the flower. That is, atheism not only fails to explain the flower, it fails to explain explanation. Atheism cannot overcome skepticism.
[02:49.280] And then finally, I put down, atheism cannot explain our consciousness of the flower. How is it if I’m made of the same stuff the flower is, that I’m conscious of the flower but the flower is not conscious of me? How does self-consciousness get explained in terms of matter and motion?
[03:03.220] So, that was just an illustration I used, was it last year? That I used in the seminar last year to show the explanatory power of theism, Christian theism over against atheism because Michael Martin had said the atheistic worldview had greater explanatory power. And I said, it doesn’t explain anything. So, what kind of explanatory power is that?
[03:28.180] You need to have every fact, every fact. Boy, that’s about as mundane a fact as you can get. Thanks a lot. Okay.
[03:41.540] There’s got to be something wrong with this system, right? That’s what people will tell you. I’m going to break up the arguments into two categories. The first one I’m going to hurry through and the second one some time until the end of our seminar. The first group of criticisms is directed at Van Til’s apologetic in general and generally what they show is a lack of comprehension that it’s a transcendental program.
[04:10.740] That if these criticisms, if the people making these criticisms had realized what you realize about the nature of Van Til’s argument, these criticisms should never have been given at all. Then the second category of criticisms, will be those who do understand that it’s transcendental and try to criticize it anyway.
[04:30.420] First of all, Van Til has been repeatedly criticized by people who say this is fideism.
[04:37.460]
There is no rational argumentation possible according to Van Til. Everybody simply has their faith commitment and beyond that there’s no argument. If you understand the transcendental character of this program, that’s absolutely absurd. Far from being fideous, Van Til’s saying is we’re going to argue and argue from any fact for the Christian worldview as the only possible truth in terms of which people can make sense out of experience. That’s not fideism, it’s the exact opposite of fideism. In the same vein, people will say Van Til’s approach reduces to the view that there’s no argument between final authorities. It’s like, you’ve got your final authority, I have my final authority, and since we don’t agree on final authorities, we can’t argue with each other. I actually had a well-known, popular, evangelical, evidentialist apologist sitting next to me on an airplane once who told me that’s what Van Til’s position was. Talk about morally and socially awkward situation to be in. Now how do I politely say that is absolute garbage? And you had better read about this before you go about telling people that. But he gives public lectures in which if he’s asked, that’s how he dismisses, at least at that point. I hope he doesn’t now, but it’s like, well, you’ve got your final authority, you have your presupposition, I have mine, we can’t argue. Van Til says we have to argue. Well, how can you argue if there are different ultimate presuppositions? What’s the answer? Transcendentally. We have to ask which provides the preconditions for the intelligibility of any argument. Okay, yes sir?
[06:17.280] …. Class Comments
[06:54.300]
… He’s just not a very effective rationalist. Right. He’s making the effort to provide rational foundations for the faith, but he’s not doing it well. That’s different from fideism, which says we shouldn’t be trying to do that at all. Thank you.
[07:20.820]
Okay, the second criticism of Van Til that we run into in the literature is that given his view of analogical knowledge and God’s incomprehensibility, Christians shouldn’t use logic.
[07:33.180]
Logic is not authoritative for Christians. Well, I mean, in my book that I’m writing on Van Til, I quote him over and over and over again to the exact opposite effect. So how can we make sense of somebody thinking Van Til rejects logic, when in fact he affirms logic? What is it that Van Til is saying that might give that impression? Van Til is saying that logic is not the ultimate authority. Jehovah, the Christian worldview, is the ultimate authority in terms of which logic is now intelligible. Does that mean logic’s not required? No, it doesn’t mean that at all. It just means that logic is subordinate to something else. That logic’s subordinate to the authority of God. And then people will say, oh, well then God could change the laws of logic, right? You say, well, not the Christian God. The Christian God doesn’t deny himself, and the laws of logic are based on his character, so you don’t have to worry about that. But the point is, you can’t exalt logic above God in authority if you’re a transcendentalist. Van Til had the good sense as a philosopher to recognize that logic, the truth of logic, is unchanging, but our discovering truths about logic is a changing science. It’s a growing science. There’s a science of logic which tries, tries to be logical. In the same way, the laws of morality don’t change. But our understanding of the laws of morality gets better and better. We do develop ethical systems, after all. Is that to say, well, everything’s relative because you believe that ethics is developing? No, it just means that what? We’re getting a sharper focus on the truth. Third argument that I’m just going to briefly deal with, although this is, it deserves maybe a whole seminar because it happens over and over and over and over and over again. It depresses me. In fact, I hardly want to go on now. I’m so depressed just thinking about it. How many times have I been told, I can’t be a presuppositionalist, I can’t follow Van Til because he rejects evidences. Why would somebody think, Van Til rejects evidences, apart from just bad scholarship, not reading? What little might they run into in Van Til that it’s not right, but gives them the idea that he’s not in favor of evidences? Right. Van Til says, if you think you can just go to the evidences in a naive, neutral way, then you’ve got a real lesson coming to you. It doesn’t work. It shouldn’t work to the degree that it works that reinforces autonomy and therefore is not great. Now, does this mean that God never uses an impure apologetical witness to bring people to conversion? Of course not. Van Til doesn’t think that his arguments are always the best formulated. God uses imperfect people. God uses people who even conceive of arguments in ways that are not all that faithful. You know what? This is going to shock you, but as a Calvinist, I believe that God even uses heretics to lead people to faith, genuine faith in Jesus Christ.
[10:45.860]
Not often. That’s not the normal way. But you know, when somebody stands in the pulpit who does not believe that the Bible is the Word of God and Jesus’ is really divine and so forth, nevertheless, reads some verses of Scripture and says some things about them, a person might in the audience hear that and say, he’s my only hope. And I don’t know how it all works, but I’m going to throw myself on him and say, God, please save me for the sake of Jesus. Now, the heretic didn’t want that, but I believe God can strike a straight blow with a crooked stick. And so, Van Til’s not saying, I’m not saying that evidential apologists, as bad as the arguments may be, never accomplish anything. God accomplishes his will, even through bad, well, bad, imperfect instruments.
[11:33.460]
But from the academic standpoint, in which we’re studying in apologetics, his arguments, their validity and so forth, Van Til says, if you grant autonomy to the unbeliever, your evidences are going to be destroyed. We’ve already used the resurrection example so many times that I can be quick with it, right? I proved to the unbeliever that a cadaver resuscitated. He says, oh, okay, I believe that. I said, good, then you’re ready to become a Christian. We’ll have you baptized next Sunday? He goes, oh, I’m not going to become a Christian. Granted, is it a cadaver resuscitated? That has nothing to do with this being the incarnate Son of God who was raised by his Heavenly Father for the sins of men so that we are now justified and he intercedes on our behalf and we can come to God through him. I don’t believe any of that stuff. I just believe the cadaver resuscitated. Well, how could you believe that? Well, it’s a chance world. As Van Til put, send it to Ripley’s Believe It or Not. Amazing! A body came back to life. Randy?
[12:29.820] …Class Comments
[12:48.240]
Right. What Randy’s saying here is, there are people who continue to call Van Til a fideist. He rejects the use of rationality or evidence because he doesn’t use their kinds of arguments. They think, well, if you’re using evidence and proofs of God’s existence in the traditional way, then you believe in a rational defense of Christianity. But if you don’t use these arguments, then you don’t believe in a rational defense of Christianity. Van Til says, guess what? Your arguments aren’t very good arguments. I hope it doesn’t depend only on that. But there are much better arguments that are rational. In fact, they what? Rescue rationality. They’re the most rational of rational arguments because they’re transcendental. …Class Comments …But it just is not the case.
[13:38.980]
Now, not only does Van Til not reject reasoning or appeal to facts, Van Til would actually use the argument from design, the argument from cause. He says, I would use the historic argument for the resurrection. There’s nothing wrong with that. The point is, it only makes sense within the Christian worldview.
[13:57.960]
Now, let’s remember that apologetics doesn’t serve only the purpose of moving the unbeliever to conversion. Most of you in this room, as I look around, probably one time or another, use the evidential approach. Maybe you still do. Why is it that when we as Christians, this is the first thing I was exposed to, I latched right onto it. Why is it we as Christians, when we read that, we say, yeah, that’s right. That shows…because it is true. And the other alternatives are absurd. But you see, that’s because what? We already came with the framework where we believe this. We also think our framework is the only true one. We believe we have objectivity and everybody else is introducing subjectivity. But if they introduce that subjectivity and you let them do that, you don’t challenge their philosophy of facts, they’re going to accept all sorts of things.
[14:48.680]
One of the things that I thought was real impressive when I was younger, not that it isn’t now, but I mean, I remember this, running into this argument. Why would somebody be willing to die for a lie? These people knew that Jesus didn’t rise from the dead and they let themselves die for that testimony. That doesn’t make any sense. That seemed impressive once. But you know, I’ve played the devil’s advocate so many times. You know, within a Christian worldview, I said, that’s right. I think the reason why they were willing to die is because they knew it was true. But step outside of the Christian commitment to the truth of this. Is your view of human nature such that people never lie to accomplish other end? Why couldn’t the early Christians be willing to die because they had a political program by which they hoped to overthrow Rome? And part of the program called on impressing people with a resurrection claim. Now, I don’t think that’s true. But an unbeliever is going to say that’s a more likely explanation for why they were martyred than that he really rose from the dead. All depends on the framework you put it in.
[15:56.200]
So, Vangel says, I would use the historic argument. It does help believers to be, you know, more secure in their faith. And if unbelievers, you know, are willing to step in, not so much to deceive them, but they’re willing to be refuted ad hominem, I’ll, you know, I’ll use that. By refuting ad hominem, what I mean here is, the unbeliever says, nobody who is scientific, nobody who’s historical could believe such ridiculous things as this. And then the evidentialist argument may not prove that it’s true, but it can really show that this guy shouldn’t be waving his hand and saying, all rational people have got to say this or that.
[16:32.780]
Well, that does seem to be pretty good evidence. Evidence of the very sort that you’re willing to accept when we talk about who founded the city of Rome and who won the Battle of Carthage and so forth. So, why is it now that you just, obviously you’re bringing prejudices to, but you say you’re not allowed to bring prejudice to. So, what I’m getting at is we can embarrass the unbeliever that on his own terms, these evidences are much better than he would have expected.
[16:59.960]
So, there’s plenty of reason why we use evidence and we actually would say only within the transcendental framework does any appeal to evidence make sense.
[17:10.200]
Okay, fourth argument against Van Til that overlooks the transcendental character of his apologetic. John Warwick Montgomery has most popularized this argument, but I’ve seen it with others too. They say that what Van Til is giving us here amounts to nothing more but arbitrary and interchangeable authority claims. Arbitrary authority claims and for that reason interchangeable.
[17:35.280]
So, Montgomery writes this little parable where the Christian says, I’ve got my authority. It’s the ultimate authority. You’ve got to accept it. And when you argue against me, I say you’re violating the authority. You’re sinning, you heretic. You’ve got to accept it. Montgomery says, well, on that basis, somebody else can come along and say, I’ve got my authority. And the idea is these authority claims are interchangeable so that everything the Christian says, the non-Christian can say back and you’re just left with a standoff.
[18:03.680]
Well, but the point is these are not interchangeable. Van Til says you’re comparing worldviews not even in terms of formal or general considerations, concrete worldviews. The exact details of the Christian worldview are what we say has that authority. So, it’s not an empty authority claim. It’s a claim to this worldview having authority.
[18:28.500]
So, once again, the transcendental nature of his argument has not been comprehended or appreciated.
[18:34.960]
And then the last in my first round of criticisms that I’ll deal with is the criticism that Van Til’s apologetic leads to this ridiculous result that unbelievers would know nothing at all then. Now, how can intelligent people make that big of a mistake? I don’t know. But intelligent people do it. I’m going to use a name here. I don’t usually like to proceed this way and I’m really not trying to embarrass somebody. I have a lot of respect for this man. Alvin Plantinga is a brilliant philosopher. He may not always do it the way I would do it but no one can doubt that he’s got a mind God’s given him, okay? He’s a smart man. Well read. When I first met Alvin Plantinga, I was still an undergraduate student in philosophy and he had come to my college to present.
[19:21.060] Some lectures and I had an opportunity for a few minutes at a break to talk to him. And I brought up the name of Van Til to get just some kind of, you know, where are you coming from about this? What value do you see in it? And Plantinga, he didn’t wave his hand. He’s very polite and everything. But Plantinga basically said that Van Til, if his, he says, since his apologetic requires me to think that unbelievers can’t know about the digestive tract of a lion, I just don’t see that this is realistic or practical at all. And I said, what makes you think that? He says, well, Van Til says the unbeliever can’t know anything. And we know that unbelievers know things. Well, that’s sad, isn’t it? And again, I’m not giving you a chump illustration here. I’m giving you a pretty smart guy. Well, he hasn’t read Van Til or bothered to understand it. Van Til doesn’t say unbelievers don’t know things. He says they couldn’t know things if their worldview were true. And our whole point is, you do know things. And therefore, since your worldview can’t account for it, you ought to give up your worldview. It’s a transcendental argument. We can take what the unbeliever knows and show from it that that would only be intelligible if his worldview were incorrect and ours were correct. Okay, so these arguments, which are fairly standard in the literature and so forth against Van Til, all rest on a failure to appreciate the transcendental character of the argument. What was number two? Rejects logic?
[21:00.160] Okay. And now, what I’d like to do is to go through one, two, three, four, five, one, two, three, four, five, six. Okay, well, six arguments that appreciate the transcendental nature of Van Til but still criticize his apologetics. But now we’re getting down to what’s worth talking about, as I see it. The first argument is this program of transcendental proof cannot be successful because no matter how long you live and how much you write and how good your arguments are, you will never have refuted all of the alternatives. He understands it’s a reductio ad absurdum argument and form. But the only way you could say yours is true from the falsity of the others is if you refute all of the others and no one can do that. And you already have the materials by which you can answer this question. You might not agree with Van Til, I hope you do, but what Van Til says is basically there are only two positions. So when you say I haven’t refuted all of them, all you’ve said is I haven’t used every illustration I could use yet. But I don’t need to use every illustration. The point is you either assume Christianity is true or it’s not.’
[22:20.100] If you say it’s not, the consequences are you’re reduced to absurdity.
Second criticism, similar to this one, is well how do you know there isn’t another possible worldview out there that would work? This is not just that you haven’t refuted all the alternatives. You haven’t shown that yours is the only necessary one because how could you know that another one isn’t available that would do the same thing? I’m going to give you two different kinds of answers to this. You pick the one you like. They supplement each other. First is in the nature of the case there can only be one transcendental. In the nature of the case to talk about two separate and by separate we mean different content worldviews doing this is nonsense in itself. It would be similar to saying there’s two ultimate authorities. There can’t be two ultimate authorities or they’re not ultimate, right? So if somebody says, well, yeah, Christianity does the job. We can make sense out of science, make sense out of logic, make sense out of morality, human dignity, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It does the job, but maybe there’ll be another worldview that can do the job too. We say, well, in the nature of the case, you can’t have two ultimate authoritative worldviews. In the nature of the case, you can’t have two transcendentals for meaningfulness. Why? Because if there were two, what have you lost? Unity. Coherence, unity, continuity is the name of the game here. Meaningfulness, intelligibility means coherence, means there’s one system of truth. If there were two transcendentals, you wouldn’t have one system of truth. You’d have two, and then what do you have to ask? What’s the relationship between the two systems? If they are different, then you don’t have unity. If they are the same with the names being changed, then we don’t have to worry about it. Then it’s just a linguistic variation. Shall I go over that again? The nature of the transcendental program is to find unity or coherence in all of our experience. So you can’t have two ultimate authorities. You can’t have two ultimate systems of truth. Because if you have two, you no longer have coherence. You no longer have unity. You have to ask the question, what is the relationship between these two? And the relationship is either that of identity under different names or diversity. And if they’re diverse, then you no longer have coherence or unity in your worldview.
[24:57.080] Even to say, now something Mike was teaching you yesterday, if you understood that, this will make sense. And if you didn’t understand this, this probably won’t. To make sense of the claim that there are two systems by which facts can be made intelligible requires another system in terms of which you’re saying that about the two. But you see, if these are by hypothesis, ex-hypothesis-ty, are the ultimate transcendental for meaningfulness, we can’t get behind them to have the one that unites the two. And by unites, I simply mean to make intelligible that there are two. To even talk about there being two, there needs to be one perspective in terms of which you talk about the two. But these two that you’re talking about are by definition ultimate. And so there can’t be a one that unites the two, even to talk about their relationship. Okay? So when somebody says, how do you know there can’t be another one out there? We say, the nature of the case, there can’t be another one out there. There can only be one ultimate transcendental worldview. Because if there were two, it wouldn’t be an ultimate transcendental worldview. You’d have to have one behind it that in one way or another makes it possible to talk about there being two.
[25:16.180] That’s one way of answering. Some of you will like that, some of you will say, what on earth is he saying? So let me give you another approach. The Christian worldview and the nature of the case has to be the only worldview that works. If it works, it must be the only one that works. Why? Because it claims to be the only one. That claim is either true or it’s false. If it’s true, then there aren’t any other ones. If it’s false, then Christianity is not a worldview that will work. So if Christianity is a transcendental, if there is one and it’s Christianity, it must be the only one. Because internally, it claims to be the only one. Sometimes you’ll feel like, I’ve got a good grasp on that, and other times I just seem real slippery and say, well, the fact that it says it’s the only one, why does that establish it? Because you’re granting that it really is a transcendental of meaningfulness. If it really is, you’re granting that it’s a true worldview. But if you grant that it’s a true worldview, then its claims must be what? True. And one of its claims is, this is the only one. If that claim is wrong, then the worldview is not as a whole true, in which case it can’t be a worldview that’s a transcendental for meaningfulness.
[26:14.180] The argument assumes there can be two true worldviews, ultimately. But on this assumption, Christianity couldn’t be true, because Christianity says there’s only one. So that’s what you might call an internal demonstration that Christianity has to be the only one. …Class Comments
[27:56.180] Yeah, in a sense, what you’re saying is what I was getting at at the end of my first approach to this, that you’d have to have now a meta-transcendental worldview, in terms of which you talked about worldviews, two of them being satisfactory to do the job. But if these are the transcendental, there can’t be anything more ultimate than them. …Class Comments … Doesn’t that go back to the issue of authority? Right.
[28:24.180] When you raise this question, where are you standing when you raise this question? If you’re standing in the absurd worldview, I can ignore you. If you’re standing in my worldview, then my answer is the Bible says it’s the only one. Mike, why are you laughing over there? Is it too good to be true, or are you having trouble with that? Yes, I think it’s too good to be true. I appreciate it. Oh, I do think it’s devastating. I appreciate and understand why those who are studying it come up with these objections. They say, wait a minute, I’ve only refuted half a dozen of these worldviews. How am I ever going to get the whole job done? You say, wait a minute, you’ve misunderstood the program. You’ve only dealt with half a dozen illustrations. Every one of them is making the same point. So how often do you have to make that point, you know? And then the question is, well, maybe there could be another one. You don’t understand what a transcendental is if you think there could be another one. In the nature of the case, there can only be one transcendental.
[29:24.180] Okay, now that’s two arguments against Van Til’s transcendental argument. We’ll see that, in a sense, repeated in these others. But I want to look at three authors now. David Hoover, Hermann Dooyeweerd, and John Frame who have criticized Van Til’s transcendental arguments. The first person you will probably not be real familiar with, I’m not aware of a lot that he’s done, but he at the time that he wrote, I think he did his doctoral dissertation on this, if I remember correctly. But anyway, he wrote a paper on Van Til for an interdisciplinary biblical research institute. And he is a professor of philosophy, or at least at the time was a professor of philosophy at Covenant College. So he’s familiar with the names of Van Til and Gordon Clark and Carnell and all these fellows. And he is trained in philosophy. I know he has some abilities there, his vocabulary and the things he refers to shows that he knows something. I just don’t know a whole lot more about him. But I’m aware of his arguments against Van Til, and I’d like to go over them very quickly. The name is David P. Hoover. H-O-O-V-E-R. David Hoover. And the paper that I’m looking at is entitled, For the Sake of Argument, A Critique of the Logical Structure of Van Til’s Presuppositionalism. Obviously, time won’t allow you to go over everything. It’d be nice to just read sentence by sentence and say, yeah, that’s okay, or here’s the problem, whatever. But I’m going to have to boil this down.
[30:56.180] So let me read, what have I numbered for you? Three or four basic sallies against Van Til. Three or four, you know, shots that he’s making. And then he has another thing that he takes some time to criticize Van Til for, but I’m going to argue that he’s really criticizing a formulation of what Van Til said, rather than the Van Til system itself. In number one, he says, how could a finite human intellect achieve the perspective necessary to run an argument of such great consequence? To repeat what was earlier cited from Van Til, now he quotes, the best and only possible proof for the existence of such a god is that his existence is required for the uniformity of nature and the coherence of all things in the world. He says that’s Van Til’s argument. But here the tacit assumption is made that the arguer has an acquaintance with, quote, the uniformity of nature and the coherence of all things in the world, such that the God of Christian theism is the only thing or being possessed of those properties and attributes sufficient to account for that world of experience. What is striking, however, is that no person this side of omniscience knows the cosmos in the required way. At very most, Van Til is logically entitled to claim that the Christian’s God is a sufficient condition to account for the world so far as his knowledge goes. Sufficient, perhaps, but not necessary. …Class Comments
[32:36.180] Oh, I think so. I think if you’ve taken our seminar, I’d like to believe that you all can take Dooyeweerd, Frame, and Hoover, read the stuff and say, oh, come on. Here’s the answer to that. You know, there are better and worse attempts that they make, but none of them are successful, I think. He’s saying here, but no one, short of omniscience, can give you the transcendental. Van Til says, that’s right. And so where are we going to get our transcendental? From God. It has to be revealed. Now, he’s going to have other criticisms. He’s not going to like that answer, but that’s what answers this. We’re not claiming to be omniscient. We’re claiming to know the one who is. And we’re using the world he has given us. There’s another aspect of this criticism. Hoover says, well, the tacit assumption is that the arguer has acquaintance with the uniformity of nature and coherence of all things in this world. Well, in the first place, that’s not what we’re claiming at all. I’m not familiar with all the coherence in this world. What am I saying? I’m projecting, as a principle, that everything is coherent. I’m projecting, as a principle, that nature is uniformed. And in terms of those principles, I reason, I do scientific research and so forth. He somehow has the idea that I’m supposed to be able to say, as my first premise, I know all of nature is uniform. Now, what I’m arguing is, if you’re going to act like all of nature is uniform, you need the omniscient perspective of the sovereign God.
[34:02.180] So, in a sense, he hasn’t understood the argument. I’m not claiming that I’m acquainted with this universally. I’m omniscient enough to provide the transcendental. I’m saying that if you’re going to act like that, that science has this universal premise. You need to have the omniscient God speak to you at the beginning of your process. Second criticism. Here he uses what is admittedly, I think, a poor illustration. Van Til says, when I come into a house and I see a floor, I can’t argue for the beams under the floor in a direct manner. I have to say, the floor presupposes that it has beams. Well, now, Hoover, every illustration has its defects. Hoover jumps on this and goes, no, wait a minute. You don’t know that this floor is such that it has beams under it. It could be this kind of floor, that kind of floor. It could have no foundation at all. Maybe it’s right on the ground and so forth. Okay. So, if you score a point here, you say, of all the brilliant, helpful, and funny illustrations Van Til had, this one backfired. That’s at best what you have here.
[35:10.180] But here’s his point. He says, the floor might rightly—I’m sorry. The floor, one might rightly suspect, although there’s no logical necessity in one’s doing so, has some foundation or other. But the nature of that foundation cannot logically be identified under the conditions that define Van Til’s thought experiment about floorboards. Okay. Forget the fact that he’s jumping on an illustration and not the system itself. What he’s saying is, the system itself can only argue there must be a foundation for our thought. But it can’t tell you what the nature of that foundation is.
[35:48.180] This morning, when I explained Van Til’s use of Transcendental Program, I said he doesn’t work from abstract questions and principles one by one, up to the Christian worldview. Van Til’s not trying to say, well first there must be a God, and now we’re going to find out what kind of God it is, right? But that’s what Hoover’s criticism assumes. Van Til can at best say there must be a foundation, but he can’t tell us whether it’s the ground underneath, or whether it’s beams with a foundation, or what have you.
[36:16.180] Van Til says, I’m starting with the blueprint of the house, thank you. I know what kind of house this is. I know what kind of floor this is. I’m not arguing the floor must have a foundation, and that’s enough. I’m saying given this blueprint of the house, it has this kind of foundation. Or this kind of, it has beams under it, to use the illustration. Better to get away from the illustration altogether. Van Til is not talking about a formal transcendental. That there must be something Van Til is saying, you’ve got to begin with the concrete transcendental of the Christian worldview. Now, Hoover criticizes something that Van Til has said, and I think he feels this is directed at the heart of the system.
[37:00.180] And earlier, I’ve said that this quotation can be understood—and I think in a much more mundane, charitable, and sympathetic way. Here’s the quote:
Van Til said, “The argument for the existence of God and for the truth of Christianity is objectively valid. We should not tone down the validity of this argument to the probability level. The argument may be poorly stated, and may never be adequately stated, but in itself, the argument is perfectly sound.”
Hoover criticizes this. I have to jump around here. He says we’re being assured here, apparently by fideistic resolve, of what must be the case metaphysically, and because it must be the case metaphysically, it does not much matter how one argues it. His interpretation of that statement is that Van Til, by fideistic resolve, says, “We’ve got a sound argument. And because we know that it’s true, fideistically, it doesn’t make any difference how badly your formulation comes out.”
Is that what Van Til is saying? I think it’s much more reasonable to say that what he’s talking about here is that arguments can always be made more precise, more adequate for different audiences, and so forth. So I’m not going to spend a whole lot of time on this, because I just think it’s a misreading of Van Til.
Now, what if I’m wrong? What if Van Til misspoke here? He didn’t just… you know, can’t we just take the corpus of his writings and say, “I guess we better edit that out. That wasn’t a good way of putting it.” Every once in a while, even Homer nods, doesn’t he? You understand the illusion? When we say Homer nodded? I mean, Homer was a great poet, but even Homer made mistakes. Okay, maybe that’s at best what I think he’s showing here.
But I don’t even think he shows that, because I think what Van Til’s saying can be made perfect sense of. He’s not saying, “Well, we know that it’s true, no matter how bad the argument is.” He’s saying the argument can be put in better form, perhaps, but there is an absolutely sound argument.
Hoover says what Van Til appears to be actually saying is that since God really does exist, and since Christianity really is true, then testimony to these facts, no matter how poorly or inadequately stated, will never lack a corresponding reality. Thus, for Van Til, whatever the formal logical or rhetorical blemishes afflict a given presuppositional argument, such an argument will not lack force or objective cogence.
Well, enough of that. That’s not what Van Til’s saying.
The third argument used by Hoover, again, I’m boiling this down and jumping into the middle, goes something like this:
Hypothetical premises can never be made to logically yield more than hypothetical conclusions. Thus, when Van Til’s apologetic argues—quote, “for argument’s sake, the Christian necessarily both starts and finishes his argument at the level of hypothesis.”
[39:56.180] Well, Hoover is saying, basically, Van Til, you’re saying if God exists, no…no, if experience is intelligible, then God exists. And so the conclusion still is what? If experience is intelligible. If. So at best, you have, hypothetically, God existing. The other alternative is experience is not intelligible. Maybe it’s not intelligible. Uh-huh. Yeah. As far as I can see, he’s well-meaning and everything, but I don’t think he’s for all of his training. To one degree or another, Van Til would say this too, I think. To one degree or another, people who don’t use the presuppositional approach are not living up to their theology. For what they know about God, man, and so forth. Anyway, he’s looking at the logical structure of Van Til’s argument, and he goes, at best, you can have a hypothetical conclusion. Because your premises are all hypothetical.
[40:58.180] Now listen to this. He says, in both cases, when you do this indirect, stand on the unbeliever’s position for argument’s sake, then stand on the Christian’s position for argument’s sake. He says, in both cases, that of the Christian’s position and that of the non-Christian’s position, the provisional or hypothetical character of the opposing sets of presuppositions is the same, must be the same. Neither, for the sake of argument, has the status of being true, only of being provisionally true to see what will happen. The question then is how Van Til exhibits Christian theism’s necessity given his ground commitment to the parity of logic that we’re only arguing provisionally.
[41:40.180] Well, when I quoted from Van Til earlier, I stopped at one point, because I was anticipating this, and you say, when Van Til says, I’m going to stand on the non-Christian’s position for argument’s sake, the non-Christian doesn’t begin with some self-attesting authority claim after all. For argument’s sake, you take his assumptions and show that they disprove themselves. But when I ask him to stand on my position, I’m saying, I want you to assume such a God as I’ve talked about, who has self-attesting authority. I’m not asking you to say, to think through a position that says, maybe Christianity is true. I want you to think through a position that says Christianity is necessarily true. Now, if Christianity is necessarily true, because God’s self-attesting authority, notice that we say logic, science, morality, and so forth. That is, I think Hoover has misconstrued the way in which we’re testing the Christian hypothesis.
[42:32.180] We’re testing the Christian hypothesis as the claim to being a transcendental necessity. We’re not testing it as the hypothesis is tested. It makes sense to do that with the non-Christian, because what? He’s a neutralist. He doesn’t have a self-attesting authority. Sure. So you work that out and say, oh, in which case you’re reduced to what? Subjectivism and skepticism.
[42:56.180] But now we want you to test, as a hypothesis, the view that says Christianity is a transcendental necessity, not just the hypothesis. And so I don’t think he’s understood the nature of this comparison argument, or the indirect argument. Then he thinks his criticisms have scored here, and so then he says, well, I think basically what it comes down to is that Van Til is engaging his argument is really nothing but a performative act, where the argument amounts to a kind of proclamation, and because I am being faithful to the real God, that my proclamation is objectively true. And Van Til’s all confused that he’s arguing, and he’s not really arguing. He’s just engaging in a performative act. Well, I don’t think he’s understood Van Til, and I certainly can state, I think I can state Van Til in a way that is free of these criticisms. Last thing Hoover says, Van Til’s is not so much a theory of the justification of specific knowledge claims, but a theistic or better, a theological characterization of human knowledge in general.
[44:06.180] And on that one, I’m going to say you’re right. Transcendental arguments, as Roderick Chisholm, a contemporary philosopher, says, transcendental analysis is an attempt to describe the most general character or characteristics, that’s the word, the most general characteristics of the things that we know, the objects of our knowledge. Hoover says, Van Til here is not justifying specific knowledge claims. Well, apart from those that are within the Christian worldview, that’s true. We’re not saying that we know the answer to what causes AIDS just because we’re Christians, right? We’re not making specific knowledge claims apart from those that are part of the worldview. Kant himself said that the result of a transcendental argument is not a theorem but a principle. Now, we’re not exactly Kantian there, but by analogy, we would agree that once you’ve got the Christian worldview, there aren’t specific knowledge claims we’re going to justify.
[45:00.180] He says, well then how do you justify those of the Christian worldview? You really have here a theological characterization of human knowledge in general, and you call that the argument. We say, that’s right. That the general character of knowing is what this world view is describing. If these things are not true, you can’t know anything at all. So far from being a criticism, I’d say, no, that’s perfectly okay if you want to describe it that way. By the way, when Van Til talks about analogy, he’s not talking about a special form of reasoning beyond what you know as transcendental reasoning, and he doesn’t have any kind of arcane clever system behind it. Van Til, when he talks about analogy, is giving a picture of what it is to know something. Remember I introduced that notion to you the first day we were together. I said, Plato has a picture of knowing, recollection. Kant has a picture of knowing. So does Van Til. His picture he calls thinking after God, analogously.
[46:00.180] And so, if David Hoover says, he’s just giving a theological description of what it is to know something, Van Til would say, yeah, right. Now what’s wrong with that description? Do you have a better way to approach it? In fact, I would argue, you don’t have a better way to approach it. Every other picture you offer destroys the intelligibility of experience. Okay, so that’s David Hoover.
[46:20.180] I better not even open this book if we’re going to get done on time. We need to be at the restaurant. Oh, no, I am. I’m just not going to do it by quotation because then I’ll get bogged down.
[46:34.180] Dooyeweerd, in essence—this is in Jerusalem and Athens, his response to Van Til in his Festschrift. Van Til had criticized Dooyeweerd. And Dooyeweerd didn’t like that. So he comes back and he says some pretty strong things about Van Til, all in the polite context of honoring you on your 70th birthday and so forth.
[46:56.180] No, I mean, that’s not unusual is what I’m getting at. That’s what scholars do. It’s like, I want to honor this man and the best way to honor you is to hit you really hard because I think this is where you’re wrong. In fact, at one point, Dooyeweerd, when he thinks he’s reduced Van Til to this really bad position, says, “Certainly the author of The Defense of the Faith would not want to say that.” So he’s saying, I honor what you said in The Defense of the Faith, and so now, you know, warm up to this criticism. You don’t want to be left with—
[47:24.180] Okay, enough of the interpersonal part of this. Dooyeweerd basically says, Van Til, the problem with your transcendental approach is that it, in fact, is no different than a transcendent criticism. It is not a transcendental criticism. It is a transcendent criticism.
[47:40.180] The word or the adjective transcendent refers to that which goes beyond human experience. And a transcendent criticism is one that’s given on the authority of God, who is beyond human experience. And the reason why Dooyeweerd says Van Til is not engaging in transcendental analysis but just transcendent criticism is because, he says, you bring the Bible in at the very beginning of your argument.
[48:04.180] A truly transcendental method, according to Dooyeweerd, must be immanent, must arise from within human experience, not from a transcendent source. And so Dooyeweerd says, I’m not going to go to the unbeliever, unbelieving scholars, and look like the communist or the Roman Catholic Church, just coming in with their dogmatic point of view. I’m going to engage in his problematic.
[48:36.180] Given his way of thinking, I’m going to challenge him that there must be transcendentals. And from within our analysis, then we’ll see that there must be, in the broadest sense, a ground motive of creation, fall, and redemption that we use in our thinking. But I won’t be trying to prove the truths of the Bible specifically, and I certainly don’t want to dogmatize about theology.
[49:02.180] So, in essence, Dooyeweerd, he resents, Van Til says, you’re really getting down in the mud with the autonomous man. You’re really groveling, you know, with the autonomous man. And Dooyeweerd real sensitive there. He goes, how can you say that when I’ve critiqued the autonomous mindset and all that? And he has. But in the end, Van Til says, if you don’t begin dogmatically with the transcendent revelation of the omniscient God, if your transcendental analysis is in fact immanent in its context, then you’re no different than what the autonomous man is doing, and you’ll never get higher. I mean, you’ll never rise higher in your conclusions than what the autonomous man could do. In terms of the way I presented things this morning, Van Til’s answer is this. I don’t believe in reasoning formally and abstractly. I reason concretely. And that means I have to begin with a concrete worldview given on authority at the outset. I don’t go out there and say, okay, let’s talk about the concept of cause and see what we can derive from that ultimately. And so Dooyeweerd’s criticism is, Van Til, you’re being a dogmatician, you’re not being a philosopher. And why is that? Because you begin with a theological transcendent revelation, rather than with the immanent problematics of philosophy. The sad thing is, we’ve heard this criticism before from unbelievers. Unbelievers say, well, no, what you’re doing here is not philosophy. That’s theology.
[50:36.180] I don’t want to get into the details of Dooyeweerd’s system, but Dooyeweerd believes there are 14 or 15 modal aspects of human experience. And yes, and he would argue that comes from an internal immanent analysis of human experience. And I don’t have time to make fun of Dooyeweerd, that’s what you’ll think I’m doing, but as an analytical philosopher, when I read Dooyeweerd, I say, boy, there’s a whole lot of mush here. I don’t know what a lot, I mean, there’s a lot of phenomenological analysis, is what it amounts to. And since I don’t like phenomenological analysis when Hosterwold does it, I guess it’s not surprising that I don’t warm up to it when Dooyeweerd tries to do it either. But for our purposes, this criticism of Van Til is, you begin with the transcendent transcendental, and so you ruin the project. Van Til says, you don’t begin with the transcendent one, you ruin the project.
[51:28.180] The third author that we’ll look at is John Frame, and those of you who’ve heard my lecture on Frame’s response to Van Til have already heard my statement of gratitude to Frame. I owe him a great deal. I respect him. I consider him a friend. And sometimes my friends make mistakes. I haven’t found perfect friends yet. So I mean this in a friendly way, but I don’t agree with what John Frame has said in criticizing Van Til’s transcendental argument. And I think I have time to go very quickly through a series of detailed observations Frame makes, but then the heart of his criticism is on page 76 of his book, Apologetics to the Glory of God. Before I get to the heart of the matter, Frame introduces transcendental argument on page 69, and then on page 71 after he introduced it he says, but I have some questions. One, first, I question whether the transcendental argument can function without the help of subsidiary arguments of a more traditional kind. Although I agree with Van Til’s premise that without God there is no meaning, I must grant that not everyone would immediately agree with that premise. How then is that premise to be proved? Well, that’s not a devastating criticism, because as I understand the transcendental program, you have a general claim that is made and then you can illustrate that from any number of facts, or any fact in human experience. And so when Frame says, well, after you’ve made that claim, how do you expect unbelievers to accept it? Well, by illustrating it.
[53:08.180] Is that supplementing it with traditional arguments? No, it’s supplementing it with illustrations of the transcendental challenge that nothing makes sense, nothing is coherent in our experience, apart from the Christian worldview. He says, second, I do not agree that the traditional arguments necessarily conclude with something less than the biblical God. In my first lecture of the day, in response to Frame, I gave a number of ways in which there are profound philosophical differences between the traditional arguments and transcendental or presuppositional arguments. And I would say that if the traditional arguments are interpreted according to the claims of those who make them, as autonomous attempts to make sense out of this world, for instance, we all see causation about us, everything has a cause, therefore this world must have a cause. Frame says, that doesn’t necessarily conclude to something other than the Christian God. I’d say, yes, it does. Because if you are being autonomous in your reasoning, the only kind of cause you could be talking about here is a natural cause. So you don’t have the supernatural God of Christianity. But on the other hand, if you mean that in their heart of hearts, traditional apologists have been reasoning this way, but they have been thinking in terms of the framework of the Christian worldview, and so they’re concluding in their heart to the Christian God, I’d say, oh yeah, I think that’s true. They thought they were talking about Jehovah. But I also say their interpretation of their argument does not lead to Jehovah. Thirdly, it should be remembered, he says, that the traditional arguments often work. They work because whether the apologist recognizes this or not, they presuppose the Christian worldview. Well, to this, I would say, if they work because they presuppose the Christian worldview, then they ought not to be offered as denying that they presuppose the Christian worldview. You understand the force of that? When the traditional apologist tells the unbeliever, I’m not presupposing anything here, I’m not begging any questions, and then the argument works, because he was presupposing the Christian worldview, I don’t see how John Frame can commend that. And then we have to say, well, then you ought to be a little more honest about the banner under which you’re flying. You were presupposing Christianity. Now, do you have to say that all the time? No. But you shouldn’t say the opposite of that, and then think that the argument works.
[55:46.180] …Class Comments … Yeah, that’s good. Barthes criticizes natural theology for doing the very same thing. No? I was on page 71. Now I’m on page 72. Number four. Frame says, I do not think that the whole of Christian theism can be established by a single argument, unless that argument is highly complex. I do not think an argument should be criticized because it fails to prove every element of Christian theism.
[56:18.180] Such an argument may be part of a system of apologetics which as a whole establishes the entire organism of Christian truth. Uh-oh. I know that John Frame’s trying to be a good and improved Vantillian, but this is crucial. He says, we don’t prove it block by block by block. Now, Van Til doesn’t deny you can talk about this block and that block and answer specific questions about this block and that block. Somebody wants to know about the resurrection. I don’t talk about everything. I talk about the resurrection. That’s fine. But the point is, in this transcendental argument, we don’t assume just the part of Christianity. We assume the whole Christian worldview. Why is that? Because it comes to us on authority and God says, who are you to disagree with me? Let God be true, though all men are liars. Number five. When he says that you can’t establish by a single argument every one of those details, well, you can if the single argument is about the whole enchilada at one time. That kind of argument doesn’t have to talk about every detail. Now, it may not be a good argument, you may say that, but if the argument works and what it’s referring to is the whole worldview, then the whole worldview is proven by that argument. So, Van Til doesn’t agree with Frame here about this block by block approach, and he wasn’t attempting to do that, and you established the whole thing. Yeah, if you have a principle that shows that the Christian worldview must be true, that proves the whole Christian worldview. Number five. If we grant Van Til’s point that a complete theistic argument should prove the whole biblical doctrine of God, then we must prove more than that God is the author of meaning and rationality. Ironically, at this point, Van Til is not sufficiently holistic. Well, this interpretation seems to suggest that Van Til is only proving that God is the ground of meaning or the author of meaning and rationality. If we begin with a concrete worldview, and we’re proving that whole worldview from rationality, then of course we are dealing with a very rich thing, much more than God and causation and logic, if you will. Number six. All this suggests a further reason why there is no single argument that will prove the entire biblical doctrine of God. Jump down a few sentences. Since there is no single argument guaranteed to persuade every rational person, there is no argument that’s immune to such additional questioning. Well, I think that my beloved professor, whom I respect, has confused proof and persuasion here. And I don’t want to mislead you. He has portions in his book where he, in a sense, tries to argue that we should identify proof in some way with persuasion. But, um, not altogether. There’s ways in which we should, ways in which we shouldn’t. But I think that confusion here, if I reject that, I reject this criticism too.
[59:16.180] He says… because they tend to persuade. Exactly. And so that makes them good arguments—well, persuasive arguments. Therefore, Van Til’s transcendental argument, like every other argument, is not sufficient by itself to prove the existence of the biblical God to everyone’s satisfaction. Okay. I agree. Not everyone’s satisfied. There are some people who, for some reason, don’t like hot fudge sundaes. They’re not satisfied. And I’d say there’s something wrong with those people. You know? How could you not like a hot fudge sundae? Now, I’m being humorous here, but you get my point. When Frame tells us, not everyone’s going to be satisfied with this argument, I say, yeah, there might be something wrong with people who are not satisfied with this argument, though. He says, page 73, almost to the bottom, there’s probably not a distinctively transcendental argument which rules out all other kinds of argument. He doesn’t think transcendental arguments are distinctive. That is, the God we seek to prove is indeed the source of all meaning, the source of possibility, of actuality, and of predication. The biblical God is more than this, but certainly not less. And we should certainly not say anything to an inquirer that suggests that we can reason, predicate, assess probabilities apart from God. And then he says, must we bring this point up explicitly in every apologetic encounter? I would say no. By the way, I wrote in my book long before I was lecturing on him, I agree. I don’t think we have to bring it up explicitly as though that’s the only thing that comes out of our mouth is talking about transcendentals. But I would say that everything we do talk about must implicitly assume it. I’m saying? Oh yeah, and then when in the traditional approach, you say, I’m not assuming things, I think that’s definitely ruled out. Okay, now let’s go to the heart of the matter, page 76. Frame grants that arguments of this form are often useful. And then you’ll notice a very kind footnote referring to my debate with Gordon Stein. But remember, he’s saying he thinks arguments of this kind are useful. But I have a question about them. He says, are indirect arguments really distinct from direct arguments? Yes. Why? Because a transcendental argument is not a deductive argument, and it’s not an inductive argument. It’s not an attempt to generalize from what I already understand to understanding or the conditions or principles of understanding. Nor is it a deductive argument from a proposition or set of propositions to what those propositions imply. And so when he says, are indirect arguments really distinct? I’m saying, yes they are. They’re as distinct as the difference between what Descartes was doing and Hume was doing from what Kant was doing.
[01:02:18.180] And if anybody suggested Kant was really just trying to out-Descartes Descartes, or out-Hume Hume, I don’t think any competent philosopher would give you credit for that. There is something different. Now, you may say what Kant was trying to do was silly. You may say he never achieved it. You can say all those sorts of things. But to think that there’s nothing distinctive about transcendental arguments—well, Mike’s the one who suggested this, and I said this in my lecture as well—it’s like Wittgenstein once said, for a mistake, this is too big. I mean, it’s like somehow Mr. Frame has gone so far out of the range of what we’re talking about that we can’t even call it a mistake. And I certainly don’t want to do it because, as I told you, I have a lot of high regard for him and his intellect. And so I want to suggest something else is going on here than just intellectual analysis. I think Mr. Frame has a very good heart and would like to see Christian apologists drawn closer together. And this is what motivates him to say these sorts of things. I don’t mean that he thinks that they’re false and he lies about it to accomplish a good end. Don’t take me, but I think he’s being led to soften the antithesis for the sake of what we can accomplish if we do this. He says any indirect argument of this sort can be turned into a direct argument by some creative rephrasing. He grants there may be rhetorical advantages to our way of putting it, but he says if we are creative enough we could rephrase a transcendental argument and turn it into one of the more standard form deductive or inductive arguments. And now I read, this is the heart of the heart: but if the indirect form is sound, the direct form will be too, and vice versa. Indeed, if I say, “without God no causality,” the argument is incomplete unless I add the positive formulation: “but there is causality, therefore God exists”—a formulation identical with the direct argument. That is, he takes the argument to be “without God no causality,” but “there is causality, therefore God exists.” Why “without God no causality”? Because it doesn’t make conceptual sense to speak of causality. Yesterday I gave you a piece of paper that offers the framework for a presuppositional argument: take P and ask, what is the precondition for the intelligibility of P? When somebody argues in the traditional way—“I see all kinds of causes out there in the world, therefore the world as a whole must have a cause, and that cause we call God”—I am making God an extension of my thinking about causation. God is the big cause, the first cause, the original cause. But that’s an extension of what I know about this world round about me.
[01:05:16.180] When I take causation and ask what are the preconditions for its intelligibility, I’m not saying God is a cause, even a big one or a first one. I’m saying that without God you can’t make sense of what you’re talking about. At this point, at the heart of Mr. Frame’s criticism, I just have to flat-footedly say, that’s wrong. You have mistakenly thought that a transcendental argument can be rephrased as a deductive or inductive argument, and it cannot. You can rephrase the argument and make one that’s similar to it. You can talk about causation in that way, but the conclusion of the transcendental argument is not that God is the first cause. The conclusion is you can’t talk about cause without God. No discussion of causation, whether He’s the first cause or not, makes sense apart from God.
Okay. As far as I know, therefore, these three writers—Hoover, Dooyeweerd, and Frame—who have directly addressed the transcendental argument, have not really successfully overcome it or shown it to be weak. They may show that it has to be, you know, spruced up, that we have to do a lot of work to illustrate it, but I don’t think that they have shown that the program itself is fundamentally flawed, or that the argument does not work as an argument.
There’s one last criticism of Van Til, and with this we’ll end our seminar. Somebody might read all of Van Til’s material, listen to some of Bahnsen’s seminars and debates, or sit through these three warm days of analysis, and say, “Well, you know, the problem with this is that Christian apologetics is supposed to be done by every Christian. That’s what the Bible says.” And it sounds like this approach can only be done by philosophy majors. Maybe some of them even struggle with it.
And I want to tell you from my heart that if that criticism were true, I think it would be devastating. But I also don’t believe it’s true. I believe that what we have been doing here today can be likened to an advanced course in systematic theology. Sometimes systematic theologians talk about some really heavy material. How about the Trinity? Wouldn’t we all say that an extensive discussion of the doctrine of the Trinity and the biblical presentation of that would call for a lot of mental stretching? And when we got done, probably none of us would walk out of here and say, “Oh, yeah, finally I got this thing cased. It’s wired. I understand this perfectly.” We’d say, “Boy, the more I understand about this, the more profound, the more complex,” and so forth.
Now, that being true, does that mean we can’t teach the Trinity to our children? Or if we do, is what we are teaching our children fundamentally flawed because it doesn’t have all the complexity, sophistication, and depth of a seminar on the Trinity? You get my point. The same truth is subject to communication at different levels of sophistication and intellectual maturity. But it’s the same truth. And it’s the same method.
[01:08:30.180] Now, I’m an adult, and I have learned a lot about the subtleties and difficulties of being a truth speaker in this world. I think you all know that the maxim that we’re not to tell lies is a lot more complex than we thought it was when we were children. Can we tell lies when we’re going to have a surprise party for somebody? The fact that we may… I mean, maybe you think we can’t. I think we can. We may. We’re allowed to. Doesn’t mean, therefore, that we don’t have any obligation to truth. But it takes some sophistication to draw that distinction, doesn’t it?
And then there are really tough things we have to deal with as adult Christians. For example, when a friend comes and says, “How do you like my new dress?” Now, what do we do? We learn in politeness to kind of skirt it, right? So we say kindly things that are, in fact, irrelevant to the question. Now, is that right for us to do? Is that a form of deception? And what do you do if your friend presses you and says, “No, no, no, I mean, would you buy this and wear this dress?” It really puts you so that it’s hard to get around that.
The fact that adults have to address these very complex issues and maybe make some fine distinctions about truth-telling—does that mean we can’t teach our children to tell the truth? Of course not. What it means is we begin at a very elementary level about truth-telling and about the Trinity, and as they grow, they develop and deepen and make more sophisticated their understanding. Their concepts become more adequate to the real world, to the life that they have to live through.
Can you teach children the transcendental argument? Yes, I wouldn’t call it that. Why would you bother to tell your nine-year-old, “Now, this is what we call the transcendental argument”? Without mentioning it and without mentioning anything philosophically sophisticated, you can certainly teach, for instance, what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 1:20: “Hasn’t God made foolish the wisdom of this world?”
You can say, “John, out there in this world, there are people who try to teach in elementary schools about mathematics, and they don’t believe in God. They think they’re really smart people. They’re worldly wise. They don’t bow to the Lord Jesus Christ, and they won’t acknowledge that God exists.” And you can ask your child, “But if God doesn’t exist, is what is true about 2 plus 2 being 4 on Tuesday going to have to be true on Wednesday too, if God doesn’t exist?” Nine-year-olds can understand that.
I could put it in philosophical jargon, but why bother? They can understand: in a chance universe, things change all the time. So I guess the truth of mathematics could change too. What we want to teach our children is this: if you are not faithful to God, as you grow up, you’re going to run into people that will tempt you to be arrogant and to act, as the book of Proverbs says, like a fool.
[01:11:38.180] You know what the fool rejoices in? That his mind shall reveal itself. He pours out folly. And then what does the fool do when he pours out folly? He returns to it like a dog returns to his vomit. By the way, that’s a statement about circular reasoning, if you didn’t recognize it. The fool pours out his folly—he vomits his worthless stuff—and then he goes and eats his own vomit. He’s just so proud of his own way of thinking.
Children understand that. Have you ever seen a dog do this? I mean, it’s gross. You don’t forget. Children understand that. And when the Bible refers to that, it’s teaching us some fundamental truths about how… well, to use… I don’t mean to be insulting, it is, but how stupid unbelievers are. To rebel against God is stupidity. Because when you rebel against God, you become a fool. You can’t really understand anything.
One of the things that has captivated me about the transcendental approach is that it can keep us busy for three days at a fairly high level of intellectual sophistication, and it can also be taught to our children as they’re growing up without any of that. To me, that suggests not that it’s perfect, but that this is coming very close to what the Bible itself teaches us about the way we should reason and the way we should interact with people in the world.
Because all of God’s people, from children to PhDs in philosophy, can do it. And I hope that these three days will have encouraged you and given you a bit more boldness—that you can do it where God places you, at the level of educational sophistication, or at the level of communication that you need for the people that you’re talking to.
The transcendental argument amounts to what Paul says in Romans 1: “Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, and their reasoning was made futile.” Hasn’t God made foolish the wisdom of this world? Well, thanks a lot.
- Four Types of Proof (1 of 10)
- Van Til’s Why I Believe in God (2 of 10)
- Kant in Context (3 of 10)
- Contemporary Transcendental Arguments, Part 1 (4 of 10)
- Contemporary Transcendental Arguments, Part 2 (5 of 10)
- Summary of Transcendental Arguments, Part 1 (6 of 10)
- Summary of Transcendental Arguments, Part 2 (7 of 10)
- Apologetical Transcendental Argument (8 of 10)
- Back to Basics (9 of 10)
- Van Til’s Critics: Hoover, Dooyeweerd, Frame (10 of 10)
