Transcendental Arguments (2 of 10) – Van Til’s Why I Believe in God

[00:00] That there’s an objective proof of God’s existence, but that led us into a discussion of proof, and we’ve kind of meandered around different kinds of proof, rationalist, empiricist, pragmatist, and now transcendental proofs. Without using the language of transcendental proofs, Cornelius Van Til illustrates transcendental reasoning to prove the existence of God in his little booklet, Why I Believe in God. And there are different publications of this. That’s why we all have ones that look a bit different.

[00:35] I’d like to just read for you and do some annotation or commentary on a couple of portions, crucial portions from the pamphlet. The first one that I want to read is, in my edition, if you can do the little one here, the original one, page 10, or if you have the other edition, it’s right above the subsection titled Objections Raised. In the booklet, Van Til is speaking with an imaginary unbeliever, and so it’s a conversational sort of thing, and he’s already broached the problem that the unbeliever says, well, you believe in God because you couldn’t help it. You were just, you know, brought up to believe in God. So then Van Til gives his testimony, gives his background, and basically says, that’s right, I was raised to believe in God.

[01:23] And as he goes through this, he comes to the end of part one of the booklet entitled Later Schooling. And then he says, this is two paragraphs before the end of the section. The telling of this story has helped, I trust, to make the basic question simple and plain. You know pretty clearly now what sort of God it is of which I am speaking to you.

[01:45] You may not realize this from reading, but I mean, that is the crucial sentence. Van Til has not been wasting his time as an apologist telling his life story because he’s been trying to get out before the unbeliever, basically his worldview. He says, now you know what kind of God. Transcendental arguments, as they’re used by Christian apologists, are not abstract arguments. They are not dealing with just formal considerations. Van Til is concretely talking about a specific kind of God. He’s laid that out. You know pretty clearly now what sort of God it is of which I’m speaking to you.

[02:25] If my God exists, it was he who was back of my parents and teachers. It was he who conditioned all that conditioned me in my early life. But then it was he also who conditioned everything that conditioned you in your early life. God, the God of Christianity, the sort of God that he’s laying out, is the all-conditioner. You need to understand that what I’m claiming is God is the condition behind everything. God is the one who makes things the way they are. Makes you the way you are, makes me the way I am, makes the world the way it is. He’s the all-conditioner.

[03:03] As the all-conditioner, God is the all-conscious one. There is nothing which is real of which God is not conscious, and that includes future states, past states. God is the all-conscious one because there is no, to use the metaphor, area of darkness in his self-consciousness. He knows everything thoroughly. As the all-conditioner, the one who controls everything, God is the all-conscious one. A God who is to control all things must control them by the counsel of his will. If he did not do this, he would himself be conditioned.

[03:42] So then I hold that my belief in him and your disbelief in him are alike. Now, if you’re following, notice the next word is not caused by him. That’s true. Van Til has already said that. But notice what he’s just done here. He says, my belief and your disbelief, because he’s the all-conscious, all-conditioning God, are alike meaningless except for him. Now, given his Calvinistic soteriology, Van Til could easily say, your disbelief has been caused by God, predestined by God, my belief has been caused or predestined by God.

[04:22] but when he says God is the all conditioner and therefore the one who predestines or foreordains whatever comes to pass Van Til is now going to wring some philosophical conclusions out of this that it’s not meaningful to argue as an unbeliever not meaningful, not untrue it is untrue as well, but it’s not even meaningful and my believing in God wouldn’t make any sense wouldn’t be intelligible, would be meaningless apart from this sort of God existing. Okay, now he whets our appetite there, and then he goes into objections raised, and he starts dealing with the way in which the world argues against Christianity and the sorts of problems that are brought up about miracles, etc., etc. And as he gets closer to the end of the pamphlet, and now starts really digging in, I’m going to pick up on page 18 in my edition with the line, it ought to be pretty plain now what sort of God I believe in. Does it sound familiar? When you’re doing exegesis and studying, well, the Bible or any scholar I mean, Van Til just put that emphasis on what sort of God, right? So now what he’s done is he’s come full circle and he’s come back to it and now for a few pages he’s going to take that argument about God the all-conditioner and drive it home. It ought to be pretty plain now what sort of God I believe in.

[05:43] It is God, the all-conditioner, remember? It is the God who created all things, who by his providence conditioned my youth, making me believe in him, and who in my later life by his grace still makes me want to believe in him. It is the God who also controlled your youth and so far has apparently not given you his grace that you might believe in him. And aside here, those of us who believe in predestination know very well what it is to be tempted ourselves and to hear other people say, you may believe in predestination, but that’s not the sort of thing you’re going to tell people, right? You evangelize, you don’t want to say, well, you’ll believe if God predestined you to do so. Van Til comes right out and says, well, he’s given me grace to believe, and apparently to this point, he has not given grace to you to believe. Boy, that’s going to make it harder for this person to want to believe this, right?

[06:35] Then he says, you may reply to this. Then what’s the use of arguing and reasoning with me? Van Til was honest. Well, that’s the point. That’s what you’re going to object. Well, there’s a great deal of use in it.

[06:47] You see, if you are really a creature of God, you are always accessible to him. When Lazarus was in the tomb, he was still accessible to Christ. He called him back to life. It is this on which true preachers depend. The prodigal thought he had clean escape from the father’s influence. In reality, the Father controlled the far country to which the prodigal had gone. So it is in reasoning.

[07:13] True reasoning about God is such as stands upon God as upon the emplacement that alone gives meaning to any sort of human argument. And such reasoning, we have a right to expect, will be used of God to break down the one-horse chassis of human autonomy. True reasoning about God is such as stands upon God as upon the emplacement that alone gives meaning to any sort of human argument.

[07:40] Van Til is saying here, if you want to argue, you’re already resting upon God. In the paraphrase that I’m getting used to using as I try to explain Van Til to people, if you want to be in the argument game, you’re already assuming God’s existence. Any kind of argument assumes God in order to be intelligible.

[08:01] Okay, I understand what you’re laying out, but I’d like to offer an alternative to the credibility of the experience. And it comes up with… No. Well, there’s something in between there.

[08:22] But the answer to your main question is no. There is no alternative worldview that is offered. Of course, I would maintain there can’t be. But any that would be are the ones that we’d love to debate publicly. I mean, I really would love to get into it with somebody who finally understands the argument and says, oh, I see what you’re saying. Then here’s my alternative.

[08:40] it. I mean, it would be child’s play to kill it. But that’s what I want them to do. But you see, good philosophers know that they can’t do that. And that’s why they say, oh, we don’t play that game. Well, we can get into that later when we start looking at the objections to transcendental arguments. And that is, why couldn’t there be two? And you’re saying, well, it’d be contradictory if there were two necessary things. I’m not sure it is, in fact, contradictory that there are two necessary things. But there are going to be some conceptual problems with that, but I have to build slowly here before we get to that. Back to your question, the answer usually is we can give a transcendental for a limited aspect of it. People say, well, logic is transcendental. If you try to deny the laws of logic, you’re assuming the laws of logic as you use them. So, if we break up our worldview, not talk about all the pieces, but then select a few pieces out of it, There will be people who might argue transcendentally about those things. But then, of course, what we’re going to do is we’re going to deal with their breaking it up, right? So, you know, wait a minute. If that’s all you have, you have to have some view of the human mind relating logic to the contingent world, too. So how is that in your worldview? And that’s what usually forces philosophers back to the first answer, which is we don’t do worldview stuff anymore.

[10:01] It may seem, especially if you don’t wander in academic circles or read a lot of philosophy, It may seem strange to you that philosophers do that today, but they do. I don’t know what else I can argue. Basically, they would look at what we’re doing in the seminar and say, you guys don’t know what you’re talking about. That’s not philosophy. We don’t do that kind of thing anymore. Or no one can do that kind of thing, so why should I try? Can’t give you a worldview.

[10:25] Let me continue. Oh, okay. The paraphrase that I’m offering is that in order to play the reason-giving game, You must already assume God’s existence. By calling it a game, I risk having people thinking I’m being flippant here. I’m not. By game, I mean you’re going to follow some procedure with an end toward winning at the end. The reason-giving game already assumes God’s existence.

[10:59] Van Til says now, but now I see you want to go home. Oh, dear. Isn’t that what I was just saying about philosophers?

[11:05] in essence they’d say no time for this time to go home and I do not blame you the last bus leaves at 12 I should like to talk to you again another time I invite you to come to dinner next Sunday but I have pricked your bubble so perhaps you will not come back and yet perhaps you will that depends upon the father’s pleasure don’t you love it he says no matter what you do it’s going to be depending upon what God has chosen Well, I maintain, rather than pushing people away from the faith, that that kind of thing entices people and say,

[11:42] why shouldn’t I be a believer? Why shouldn’t I engage in this discussion and so forth? But anyway, deep down in your heart, you know very well that what I’ve said about you is true. You know there is no unity in your life. You’ve got to make sure you highlight that sentence. You know there’s no unity in your life.

[12:00] You may have many, many, many, many experiences, Many, many thoughts. Many, many beliefs. But you don’t have any way of bringing them together. You want no God who by his counsel provides for the unity you need. Such a God, you say, would allow for nothing new. So you provide your own unity.

[12:17] Okay, an explanation of Van Til saying, you’re going to object that if God foreordains everything, then there’s nothing new. Well, of course, for God, there isn’t anything new. It’s new for us, though. But since you don’t want God to be the principle of unity, connecting all the events in the world and so forth, then you try to provide that principle of unity yourself. But this unity must, by your own definition, not kill that which is wholly new. Therefore, it must stand over against the wholly new and never touch it at all. And thus, by your logic, you talk about possibles and impossibles, but all this talk is in the air.

[12:56] Again, for those of you who are not familiar with this, Van Til says, if you have a principle of unity that deals with possibility, what is logically possible, what is scientifically possible in terms of laws of nature, what have you, you want to hold on to those principles, but you also want to say those principles cannot determine what’s going to happen, because then there would be nothing new, and that’s why you objected to God being the principle that gives unity.

[13:22] By your own standards, your principle of unity, it can never have anything to do with reality. Another way of stating this is your principles of unity can only be abstract principles. Formal principles of logic or statements about causality and nature but nothing that gives you any detail about what is reasonable, what is natural, what we know from observation. Your logic claims to deal with eternal and changeless matters. Your facts are wholly changing things and never the twain shall meet.

[13:57] Earlier in the seminar, I referred to this in passing when I said, if you have the laws of logic here, the question is, how can they apply to the realm of experience? And somebody says, well, it’s easy. We do it all the time. Okay, but the question is, how is it possible that we do it all the time? I’ve got a Christian answer to that. What’s your answer? Because on your worldview, the laws of logic stand by themselves as what? Unchanging abstract principles. And on your worldview, the facts of the world are irrational, changing flux matters. How do you get abstract, unchanging things in connection with concrete, constantly changing things? You can’t use both languages.

[14:38] That’s like trying to talk German and English at the same time. If you’re going to talk the language of abstract formalities, you can’t talk the language and concrete details that are always changing. So how do you bring these two together? And Van Til says, on your worldview, never the twain shall meet. Now, some of you are saying, but they do meet. So how can you make that objection? We’re not arguing that they don’t meet. We’re arguing that on the unbeliever’s worldview, they could never meet.

[15:07] On our worldview, they meet. Where do they meet? In the mind of God. God’s mind is the transcendental background to logic. and God’s mind is what controls all the changing details of history as well. So we do know that they meet, and we have a picture in terms of which it makes sense to reason in terms of logic and empiricism. But Van Til’s saying, on your worldview, your logic, he says, claims to deal with eternal and changeless matters, and your facts are wholly changing things, and never the twain shall meet. So you have made nonsense of your own experience. He’s not saying experience is nonsense. He’s saying that on your approach, it would be nonsense. You’ve rendered it nonsense.

[15:53] With the prodigal, you are at the swine trough. But it may be, unlike the prodigal, you will refuse to return to the father’s house. Van Til was a very tender Christian man. But this is a tough-minded analogy. I don’t want you to think he’s just now talking about a heartwarming to the gospel here. What he’s saying is, you’re at the swine trough intellectually, and it may be that you refuse to go back to the Father’s house, because you may realize that the only intellectual option is what? To go to God.

[16:29] Yeah. And I think the debate did that, and I appreciate the reference to it. But, you know, I had communication with him after that debate for a number of months, I think, six, seven months.

[16:44] and in the process of this going back and forth I challenged him on his world view I remember I said you couldn’t drive your car or balance your checkbook and his comeback was but I do balance my checkbook and drive my car of course I had him right where I wanted him and I said oh yeah I know that you can do so but your world view can’t make sense out of it here’s a man who was at the intellectual swine thought that he will not give God the credit he will not come back to the father’s

[17:13] household Van Til says, on the other hand, by my belief in God, I do have unity in my experience. Not, of course, the sort of unity you want. Not a unity that is the result of my own autonomous determination of what is possible. But a unity that is higher than mine and prior to mine. On the basis of God’s counsel, I can look for facts and find them without destroying them in advance.

[17:42] Here’s a fact. quinine relieves malaria. Now, Van Til says, if I know that fact, then I need to know the concept of quinine, relief, and malaria. I know their relationship. But if I already know their relationship, then I don’t need to go look, do I?

[18:03] And say, well, but what if you don’t know their relationship? And he says, well, then I don’t understand the concept. Not fully. Because it could be argued that a person doesn’t understand quinine as well as he could, or should, unless he knows that it relieves malaria. And so what Van Til’s getting at here is it’s like you have to know it before you go find it, if unity is being provided by our own mind. On the basis of God’s counsel, he says, I can look for facts and find them without destroying them in advance. Why? Because God knows them in advance, makes them what they are, and then I discover them thinking God’s thoughts after him using rational, empirical, pragmatic methods. On the basis of God’s counsel, I can be a good physicist, a good biologist, a good psychologist, or a good philosopher. In all these fields, I use my powers of logical arrangement in order to see as much order in God’s universe as it may be given a creature to see. The unities or systems that I make are true because genuine pointers for the basic or original unity that is found in the counsel of God.

[19:08] So this is where we get Van Til’s notion of analogical knowing. God has a system of thought in terms of which he’s ordered reality, all truths, that means conceptual relationships, all historical relationships, natural relationships, causal, psychological, volitional. God knows all these things. And then when I know things, I’m thinking God’s thoughts after him. I’m discovering these things that God has already thought through, to use the human metaphor. I can find unity in my experience because there’s an original unity that God has as the creator and controller of all things.

[19:47] Van Til says, looking about me, I see both order and disorder. I don’t think he should have put it that way. What he meant is newness or particularity, that which is not already organized. Looking about me, I see both unity and particularity in every dimension of life. But I look at both of them in the light of the great orderer who is back of them. This metaphor, back of them. A lot of philosophers get upset when we start talking, you know, in terms of anthropomorphisms and all that. But that’s all right. In the end, everybody has a picture of what’s going on when we know them. And Van Til says, here’s my picture. Back of the world, there’s a God who has ordered everything.

[20:29] I look at order and particularity unity and particularity in light of the great orderer who is back of them I don’t have to deny one or the other and then I’m going to skip a few lines save some time I see the strong men of logic and scientific methodology search deep into the transcendental for a validity that will not be swept away by the ever changing tide of the holy new only to return and say that they can find no bridge from logic to reality or from reality to logic.

[21:05] And yet I find all these, though standing on their heads, reporting much that is true. Van Til says, they’re all messed up philosophically. They can’t bring order and newness. They can’t bring particularity and unity into their experience and make it intelligible. They always have logic over here and they have particularity over here and the two are fighting each other. He says, yet, even though they’re standing on their heads, they’re still able to find a lot of truth. I need only to turn their reports right side up, making God instead of man the center of it all. And I have a marvelous display of the facts as God has intended me to see them. He says, if we take man away from being the center, then we won’t be reduced to subjectivism and skepticism at every point.

[21:48] Man’s not at the center. We rather have to think God’s thoughts after him. We turn it inside out or right side up. God then becomes the great orderer and we’re to think his thoughts after him. And if my unity is comprehensive enough to include the efforts of those who reject it, it is large enough even to include those who have been set upright by, excuse me, those who have been set upright by regeneration cannot see that which those who have been set upright. He’s saying, I’m offering a unity to my reasoning which is big enough to account even for the unbelievers thinking. if I can paraphrase. My unity is comprehensive enough to include the efforts of those who reject it.

[22:31] So the picture that Van Til offered, and I’ll use it here just for those of you who may be struggling, he said, a child who sits on her father’s lap is able to slap her father’s face, but only because she’s sitting on his lap. Unbelievers can slap God’s face, to use the metaphor. They can argue against God, but only because intellectually they’re sitting on his lap to begin with. End of the paragraph I was reading.

[22:57] No human being can explain in the sense of seeing through all things. But only he who believes in God has the right to hold that there is an explanation at all. Okay? Only Christianity is in the explanation game. Everybody else can’t play it. Now, everybody’s trying. As Van Til said, they’re on their heads. But only God, the Christian God, the sort of God who is the all-conditioner, the all-conscious one, the great orderer, only that kind of God, only if you assume him as behind all of your reasoning and experience, can you offer an explanation at all.

[23:36] Van Til says, So you see, when I was young, I was conditioned on every side. I could not help believing in God. Now that I am older, I still cannot help believing in God. He is subtly changed, you see, from God has conditioned him in the sense of foreordination, opened his heart and convicted him and has spiritually drawn him to himself. So now, intellectually, as an older person, he says, I still cannot help believe in God. I believe in God now, because unless I have him as the all-conditioner, life is chaos.

[24:11] Earlier, he had said, you have no unity in your experience, and you know it. You want to know why I believe in God? Because if I don’t believe in God, life is chaos. There is no possibility of unity and therefore no possibility of explanation. There is no intelligibility to experience. And we’ll stop there for lunch. When we come back, I’m going to be reading from the survey of Christian Epistemology and putting a more philosophical slant now on what he has explained in a garden variety way.

[24:40] All right, welcome back from lunch. We, before our break, had been looking at Van Til’s reference by way of illustration to a transcendental argument from God’s existence. And I know that the philosophers among us, that’ll be fairly clear, but I know many of you are new to this, and I’m just going to real briefly try to give it to you in a thumbnail sketch.

[25:04] You’re arguing with somebody who, in essence, says their view of the world is it’s chance. It’s random. There is no intelligence behind the world that governs the world, the things that happen, any connection between thoughts or truths, any connection between events and so forth. That a person who has that point of view, in essence, has given up the ability to give explanations. In a chance universe, there are no explanations. Ultimately, what appears to explain what happens can’t really be an explanation because an explanation relies on principles of unity. that relate individual events or individual truths to one another.

[25:46] So a person who says, well, as far as I’m concerned, there is no God, that person believes in a chance universe. Van Til says, well, then you can’t give explanations or reason at all. There is no order in your experience, except, of course, the order that you impose upon your experience by your own mind. And the problem with that is, first, even if you could call that order, it would be imposed by your mind, it would be subjective, not objective, and it would reduce then to skepticism. But then secondly, how can the mind impose order on a chaotic universe?

[26:20] Essentially, you’ve cut yourself off from understanding anything, even if it’s ordered, it’s all internal to you. So, Van Til says, why do I believe in God? Because without God, I couldn’t explain anything. All explanation, the explanation-giving game, the reason-giving game itself assumes a view of the universe that’s contrary to anything that doesn’t endorse the Christian worldview, contrary to atheism and so forth. Now, when Van Til wrote that, he was well into his career, and he was already popularizing his point of view, and that’s good. I’m glad he did. I think many of us have profited from that little booklet, and we finally understood what he was getting at. All of a sudden, it hits you like a ton of bricks. That’s a powerful argument, Essentially saying, if you wish to argue with me, you’re stepping outside your worldview and into mine already. And not everyone’s willing to accept that, but that’s what we do in apologetics. We try to show people, you know, you’re assuming the Christian worldview. That’s the popular way of putting it.

[27:20] If you go back to Van Til’s first syllabus, which at that time was the metaphysics of apologetics, now retitled A Survey of Christian Epistemology, You’ll notice what he tells us about transcendental arguments beginning on page 10. This chapter, chapter 1, is entitled Epistemological Terminology. He’s just going through the terms that are commonly used in epistemology, theory of knowledge, the ones that he thinks are particularly important. And as a sidelight benefit to this seminar, I try to give you some hints on other things.

[27:58] you want to study theology, philosophy, you can hardly do better than to organize the important terms or concepts and define them. Now, there’s more to it than that, but I found early on when I was studying theology, in fact, John Frame, our instructor, required us to do this, he would tell us what the most important terms in the readings and lectures would be, and he said, at the end of the term, I expect you to be able to define them. A good deal of our intellectual work is mastering concepts reduced to definitions in this case. That’s why I think this opening chapter of the book, I was at first tempted just to say, that’s not that big a deal. It’s just terminology. I know the terminology. But he’s encapsulating the really important part of this apologetic in his theory of knowledge. So let’s see what he says about transcendental, the word transcendental.

[28:49] The opening line says, one more point should be noted on the question of method, namely that from a certain point of view, the method of implication may also be called a transcendental method. Now, I can’t go over that sentence without backing up. Van Til’s been talking about how we know what we know, the question of method. And he’s identified the Christian method of knowing as what he calls the method of implication that will not communicate to many people. And those to whom it communicates will probably have the wrong idea, because the word implication is being used by Van Til here in a very technical sense, very narrow. It’s not your garden variety. Even initial study of philosophy, where you have some idea of logical implication, that’s not, well, it includes that, but that’s not what he’s talking about. The term implication was used in idealist philosophy for any, what I’ll call, knowledge-gaining procedure, any intellectual procedure that’s knowledge-gaining.

[29:55] And the reason it was called the method of implication is because from an idealist standpoint, to know something as true is to know it in terms of a coherent theory. So things are never known in isolation. You can’t know just one truth. You have to know a truth in connection with other truths. And particularly, the system of truth is a coherent one. So the coherence theory of truth is a proposition is true if it’s found within a coherent theory. The idealist said there’s but one coherent theory that encompasses everything. Therefore, to the degree that we know anything, any method by which we learn things or we draw deductions or inductions is called implication. because we are moving out from a proposition to its broader context and therefore implicating ourselves into the system.

[30:52] If that doesn’t make a lot of sense, well, it makes sense, but if that doesn’t sound real familiar to you, don’t worry about it. It’s just that what Van Til was saying in this opening sentence is what I’ve just talked about is the method of implication. Now let me make it real easy for you. I’ll call it a transcendental method.

[31:08] and i’m chuckling because there was actually a day at westminster seminary when the professors could assume the students had studied philosophy and they’d understand this stuff and i don’t know about other seminaries but i don’t think it was true altogether at westminster then and it certainly is not true at any of the seminaries now but Van Til thinks by using the word transcendental that make it all much easier for you that’s why we’re having the seminars because we’re unaccustomed to this kind of thing. All right, so the method of implication may also be called the transcendental method. Back on track. We have already indicated that the Christian method uses neither the inductive nor the deductive method as understood by the opponents of Christianity, but that it has elements of both induction and deduction in it if these terms are understood in a Christian sense. Deduction is the method of rationalistic proof. So when I earlier today had up on the board kinds of proof, rationalist proof uses deduction to be simple about it. Empirical proofs are inductive proofs. And what Van Til says is the transcendental method, Christian transcendental method, rejects both deduction and induction if they are understood within the autonomous worldview of the unbeliever. If principles are abstract and stand by themselves, like principles of causation, principles of logic, then we don’t have anything to do with that. He says, but if you think within the Christian worldview, we affirm both induction and deduction. Induction and deduction are necessary for the Christian because the Christian’s picture of knowing is that of thinking God’s thoughts after him.

[32:57] Let me take another step back and discuss this picture of knowing. A good deal of the history of epistemology revolves around how we should picture ourselves as knowers. When we know something, how should we envision that? What is it to know something? We’re not asking how we know it, although that’s involved. We’re asking now just what is the general view of reality, of human life in the world, of man’s relationship to his environment, to God, whatever. What picture do you have given your theory of knowledge? And I’ll give you three or four here just to illustrate.

[33:34] For Plato, the picture is that of recollection. See, Plato doesn’t just talk about abstract principles of epistemology. Plato says when we know something, we know its form or its general idea. And the way in which we know the form or general idea of something is because we were familiar with it in a previous life. And now we’ve come into this world, the soul has been encased in a body, the Platonic doctrine of incarnation, pagan incarnation. The soul has been placed in this body, and the body has a sensation. It has experience of the changing world round about. And in that, the mind is stimulated to remember duckness, triangularity, justice, love, whatever it may be. Okay, we don’t have to go any further than that. It’s just that when you think about it, Plato then has a, quote, picture of the knowing process. We can call it the picture of recollection. We’re remembering. Today we would say intuitive what these forms are.

[34:38] Now Aristotle comes along and Aristotle doesn’t like Plato’s picture. Maybe you haven’t thought about it in those general worldview terms. Aristotle, all of his objections to Plato are in the service of a different picture of us as knowers. For Aristotle, we’re not being reminded of something that exists separate from us and that we knew in a previous life when we encountered the world. For Aristotle, when I encounter particular things in the world, my mind is working on them to abstract from them their form. And so Aristotle has an abstractive picture of the knowing process. So I see a duck on the pond and I see another duck on the pond, another duck on the pond.

[35:21] and I look at these and what my mind does is not remember duckness from the previous existence, recollection rather my mind works on those sensations to pull their form out of them, to abstract them so now I have an idea of duck not just a particular duck but the general, the universal duck and that comes about by abstraction, I think that’s one of the most preposterous theories of knowledge that’s ever, you know, come down the pike in western philosophy, in my opinion, many people like it But I mean, that calls for a lot of faith, that the mind, I mean, remember, in a pagan

[35:55] environment, not a Christian one, in a pagan environment, that the mind, which is not itself physical, nevertheless is in touch with sensations that are physical and can extract from the sensations a mental form. Give me a break. That’s, to me, desperate. But nevertheless, that’s been a very popular picture of knowing. Now, as we jump ahead in the history of philosophy, I can’t do everybody for you, but let’s think about Locke and Kant and their pictures of knowing. What are we thinking of ourselves reflectively? What is the picture we have of ourselves as a source?

[36:33] Well, for Locke, the mind is a tabula rasa, Latin for a blank tablet or blank slate.

[36:40] okay the mind is passive and blank and then the senses impinge on that blank tablet the tabula rasa and we then combine our sensations into ideas well whether that’s true psychologically or not it’s not true psychologically you can be pretty sure of that but whether it is or not that is a picture it’s a way of rationally reconstructing the knowing process but Kant’s picture was completely different. Where Locke has a passive mind, Kant is more like Aristotle. The mind is active. The mind, you might think about it like an ice cube tray that is imposed upon the chaos of water, so that rather than having water that runs everywhere, the mind ends up with ice cubes, formed concepts that are in time and space. It’s not that time and space are real, and it’s not that our concepts are objective and we’ve encountered them, it’s that that’s the way the mind requires us to think.

[37:45] So the mind actively imposes things on experience to make them intelligible. So in the case of Locke, the mind is passive, receiving everything. In the case of Kant, the mind is formulating what it thinks. The mind helps the intelligibility process along. I’m only going to give you four pictures that way, but you get the idea of, you have some idea of what I’m talking about when I say we have to think of a picture of ourselves as knowers. When we know things, are we recollecting? Are we abstracting? Are we being impinged upon passively? Are we actively forming?

[38:23] Well, what’s the Christian view? Van Til says we should see ourselves as thinking God’s thoughts after him. Unbelieving philosophers would say, oh, we’re not in Sunday school. We don’t want to talk about that. Van Til says, hey, you don’t use that picture, and it’s not just that you’ll end up outside of Sunday school. You’ll end up outside the academy. You won’t be able to make sense of your reasoning and your science, your psychology, your ethics, anything.

[38:48] So here’s the picture he proposes. God is the original knower. God knows everything, first of all, in and of himself, and God’s the one who plans the universe. God creates the universe. God controls the universe by his thoughts. And when we know things, we therefore need to know the mind of God. Now, we can do that either by his directly revealing himself. God can actually give us, in human words, what we should think of him.

[39:14] Now, if you take that approach, this is a side note here. If you take that approach, then you don’t face any of these modern theological problems with the Bible and its language being anthropomorphic, whether language is meaningful, and so forth. What you say is, given my picture of knowing, God knows exactly what words to use to talk about himself. So God calls himself a shepherd, calls himself a father. Somebody says, yeah, but we don’t know exactly how that metaphor is to be used. You say, yes, we do. The Bible shows us how to use that. For instance, in times when we need comfort, we call upon God, who is our shepherd. When we are disciplined by God, we know it’s in a shepherding kind of context, where he does it for our good.

[39:58] So we do know how to use that. But the point is, God gives us the language by which we can speak of him accurately. Even if we’re not thinking literally what God himself is, who could know God in his essence except God himself, after all? The fact is, what we do think about God is accurate because he gave us the word. So that’s one kind of revelation. But the mind of God is also revealed in the world round about us. The mind of God is revealed in conceptual order, logical order, causal order the mind of god is revealed in ethical evaluation it’s also revealed although this is my weak spot as a philosopher i think in aesthetic judgments you know god is reflected in beauty and it’s only got it’s only because of the christian worldview that we can make sense out of judgments about beauty and so forth but the point is when we then go out and experience the world empirically Van Til says we are learning about the mind of god not that the world is the mind of God, but the world reflects how God has ordered things. So I can learn about duckness because God knows the universals about ducks. He knows all the properties and how they’re to be applied. But God also knows particular ducks because he created the particular ducks. So he knows all the details and all the universals. And when I’m learning either details or universals by generalization, I’m reflecting God’s mind. And when I make causal judgments about back to quinine relieving malaria, if what I say there is true, I’m learning what the mind of God has done in ordering the universe round about me. So philosophers all have pictures, different pictures of the knowing process. Some see it as recollection, abstraction, passive reception, active formation. Van Til says the picture we should have is a much richer one. We should picture ourselves thinking God’s thoughts after God has thought them. God thinks them, and then we reflect God’s thoughts in our own mind. Now, if we think God’s thoughts after him, we must think deductively. Why is that? Because in God’s mind, there’s perfect coherence.

[42:09] And so not only is logic permissible to the Christian, Van Til says logic is required of a Christian. It is not a virtue for a Christian to be illogical. Well, there’s what? 80% of the evangelical world, right? Not that Van Til would wipe him off from that, but Van Til would call on evangelicals who talk that way and say, you’re not honoring God. And you say that we should just have this emotional experience, not to worry about coherence and logic. Likewise, Christians must be engaged in scientific research or be interested in empirical learning. Why is that? Well, I think this is kind of fascinating. The way things have happened in history, the way things operate in the natural world, cannot be imagined out of our own minds, right? I can’t just think up the law of gravity and say, well, that’s the way it is out there. If I could, who would I be? I’d be God, Right. And so if I understand my position as a creature, I must use empirical methods because since it’s God’s mind that makes the world the way it is, the only way I can find out about it is to get out of my chair, get out of my imagination and go out there and touch the world, observe it, see what really happens when lions are put in the same cage with squirrels and so forth.

[43:30] I can’t just sit back and say, I think probably the squirrel would kill the lion. No, I’ve got to find out about the world. I’ve got to, you know, that’s why a lot of what we call common sense is common sense because we’re made in the image of God. All of that to explain one or two sentences. I’ll move on here.

[43:52] Because there’s coherence in God’s mind. In his thoughts after him, then we need to be logical in the conclusions we draw and the way that we reason or think. deductive reasoning draws conclusions from premises with certainty because there are laws of logic or binding laws that tell us how to use the words all some not if then or and now that’s first order predicate logic that i just described for you there are other logics that we could get into but if you look at the back of say Copi’s introduction to logic he gives rules for inference And I’m going to be real simple here.

[44:31] Modus ponens is one of the best-known rules of inference. If I have a premise that I know to be true, and it’s in this form, if P, whatever that proposition is, then Q. That is, if P is true, Q is true.

[44:47] Now, I know not all if-then sentences are true, though, are they, as a whole? So, if I say, if Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, then Shakespeare was a second-rate writer. That’s an if-then statement, right? Would you say it’s a true one? No, not many people would. If you really hated studying Shakespeare in high school, out of resentment, you might say that. But I doubt that, objectively, people would say that’s a true one. So, not all if-thens are true if-thens. But if you have one that is true, and you also know that the first part of that is true, the P, so we know if P then Q is true, and we know that P is true, then a deductive argument would tell you that you also know that Q is true.

[45:37] This is the first premise. Remember that P and Q are not, in this case, the premise. The premise is how they are connected by this arrow, which in logic stands for if then. If P, if P is true, then Q is true. That’s what this sentence asserts. It says nothing about Q or P being true. So now if my next proposition in the argument is P, now I am asserting P and saying that it’s true. If P then Q, if that’s true, and if P is true, then I can draw the conclusion, Q is true, and I can do it with deductive certainty.

[46:18] I forgot who asked the question. Does that explain what I’m getting at by the laws of logic?

[46:25] So Van Til believes in the use of empirical methods. Van Til believes in the use of logic. Not only says it’s permissible, it says it’s required. Because we have to think God’s thoughts after him. We can’t create reality in our own image. So you have to study. You have to research. And you don’t have the right to just arbitrarily draw conclusions. You have to think in a coherent way, as God thinks, coherently. We are going to get this section finished, I promise you.

[46:54] Now, when these two elements are combined, we have what is meant by a truly transcendental argument. A truly transcendental argument takes any fact of experience which it wishes to investigate and tries to determine what the presuppositions of such a fact must be in order to make it what it is. That’s a sentence you’ve got to have underlined, emphasized. I love my neighbors. The Bible tells me I have to. A truly transcendental argument takes any fact of experience which it wishes to investigate.

[47:33] Let me begin with that part. Van Til says, our argument doesn’t depend upon certain special kinds of information. Many Christian apologetic approaches depend on looking at things like miracles, let’s say. Van Til says, I don’t have to look at a fact that is a miracle fact. I can take any fact, whatever you want to talk about. Want to talk about electricity? Fine. Want to talk about medicine? Fine. Want to talk about the opera? Fine.

[48:01] take any fact that you wish to investigate and try to determine what the presuppositions of such a fact must be in order to make it what it is. When I talk about electricity, I give you certain facts about electricity. You can’t understand what electricity is without knowing some other things besides electricity. You can’t understand electricity in a vacuum.

[48:30] You can’t understand anything in the back of it, all right? No one believes just one thing, you know that commercial that challenges people to try to eat just one potato chip, but we have the counterpart you see in philosophy, so try to believe just one thing, and don’t believe anything else is the context, don’t believe anything about language that’s used to express that fact, just try to believe just that, Well, of course, it’s impossible. As I put it in my broad seminars, or seminars for a broad audience, all of our beliefs come in clusters. You can’t have one belief by itself.

[49:09] So Van Til says, when you look at the fact about electricity or about the opera, whatever it may be, and you make a judgment regarding it, how would it be possible to make that judgment? What presuppositions are necessary to make sense out of that judgment? What else would have to be true in order to make sense of what you’re saying? And that very simply is the transcendental method.

[49:33] An exclusively deductive argument would take an axiom such as that every cause must have an effect and reason in a straight line from such an axiom, drawing all manner of conclusions about God and man.

[49:44] A purely inductive argument would begin with any fact and seek in a straight line for a cause of such an effect and thus perhaps conclude that this universe must have had a cause. Both of these methods have been used, as we shall see, for the defense of Christianity. Yet, neither of them could be thoroughly Christian unless they already presupposed God. Any method, as was pointed out above that does not maintain that not a single fact can be known unless it be that God gives that fact meaning is an anti-Christian method. What does this expression mean, to give a fact meaning? Well, to put it bluntly, it means to give any particular sensation a context in terms of which it’s connected to other things related to the problem of predication. But here he’s talking about facts, in the sense of sensing something in the world, in order for me to make sense of, okay, right now I’m sensing Mike Butler’s shoe, right, but in order for that sensation to make sense, I had to understand that it was a shoe connected to a foot, or theoretically connected to a foot, I had to understand what shoes are for, I had to understand what the English word shoe means and so forth. Van Til says we don’t just have brute sensations. They are interpreted, and therefore they are meaningful. Interpretation in one way or another, either by causal connections, logical connections, sometimes literary and imposed connections. Anyway, particulars are connected to other particulars, and therefore there’s a pattern of meaning.

[51:32] Any method, as was pointed out above, that does not maintain that not a single fact can be known unless it be that God gives that fact meaning is an anti-Christian method. On the other hand, if God is recognized as the only and the final explanation of any and every fact, neither the inductive nor the deductive method can any longer be used to the exclusion of the other. that this is the case can best be realized if we keep in mind that the God we contemplate is an absolute God.

[52:04] What does it mean, an absolute God? I ask questions and then I answer them, right? What? Okay. You tell me. What’s an absolute God? What’s absolute mean? What? Okay. Covenantal? Comprehensive. Okay. Comprehensive meaning covering everything so there’s nothing missing.

[52:26] There’s no flaw in God. Comprehensive, he’s in control of all things. But he doesn’t have to worry about any other factor coming in to what he does. He’s unconditioned. He’s unqualified. He doesn’t answer to anything. He’s not subject to any conditions except his own. Okay, so absolute means unqualified, without restriction. God is unrestrictedly God. Nothing keeps him from exercising his sovereign prerogative. There’s no ignorance outside him that he has to worry about. There’s no force outside him that he has to deal with. God is absolute.

[53:07] Van Til says, now the only argument for an absolute God that holds water is a transcendental argument. A deductive argument as such leads only from one spot in the universe to another spot in the universe. That’s his metaphorical way of saying what Kant did, that deductive arguments for God are only dealing with the way our mind works with our phenomenal experience of the natural world. From one spot in the universe to another spot, it never leads to a spot outside the universe, is Van Til’s point. So also an inductive argument as such can never lead beyond the universe. In either case, there is no more than an infinite regression. In both cases, it is possible for the smart little girl to ask, if God made the universe, who made God? And no answer is forthcoming.

[53:57] The answer is, for instance, this answer is, for instance, a favorite reply of the atheist debater Clarence Darrow. That gives you some idea of how old this book is. He chooses this as a contemporary example, Clarence Darrow. That’s okay.

[54:16] But if it be said to such opponents of Christianity, that unless there were an absolute God, their own questions and doubts would have no meaning at all. There is no argument in return. Bingo. Again, you want to make sure you have that highlighted in your book. Unless there were an absolute God, their own questions and doubts would have no meaning at all.

[54:42] The Bible says, there lie the issues. So people may have what seem on the surface to be really strong considerations against God, arguments and challenges. But Van Til’s apologetic doesn’t say, give us enough time, we’ll work on an answer to everything that comes down the pipe. We can do that too. Van Til says, you couldn’t even make sense of your argument if the God you were arguing against didn’t exist.

[55:11] And I’m going to digress for a moment to illustrate this. so I want to make sure everybody appreciates it. It’s not always easy in epistemology and metaphysics to get people up and running, but I find most people understand ethical considerations. So I’m going to use ethics for the sake of clarity of illustration. Let’s say somebody comes to me and says, Dr. Bahnsen, how could you possibly believe in a God that allows all these wicked, evil things to happen in the world? Now, maybe I could come up with an answer for every single evil thing that happens in the world to satisfy the unbeliever. Probably not, but Van Til says, why even get started going down that line when the best thing to say is your very objection presupposes the thing you’re objecting to?

[55:58] How is that? Let’s analyze this, think this through. The person comes to me and says, wicked, evil things happen in this world, so God couldn’t exist. I say back to him, that argument presupposes that God exists. Because if you don’t presuppose that God exists, you can’t call anything evil and wicked. I know that seems strange, because psychologically, the thrust of the argument is anti-God, no doubt about it. But what we’re going to be able to do if we reason transcendentally is to say, no matter what the direction of the argument is, as an argument, it presupposes God. And that’s why no argument can ever disprove God, because as an argument, it assumes the thing that it’s trying to disprove.

[56:43] Now, I told you all, you must jump in. Does anybody not understand this? I hope you consider it brilliant. I didn’t do it myself, so I’m not asking for that. But, I mean, that reply, there is no way out of that.

[56:56] Now, there are psychological problems with evil. There’s no doubt about it. You know, if I tell somebody God has a morally sufficient reason for what he does, but you can’t call anything good or evil if you don’t have God to begin with, that doesn’t mean that you feel real easy about the evil that you see. They say, oh, okay, well, now Bosnia is perfectly all right with me. You know, and now mass murderers were, no, it’s not. It’s still, I mean, I have lots of days about my own puny life, but also about big, massive things that are in the news, and I’d say, I just understand why God does that. It’s not an attempt, you know, to dethrone God. But I psychologically am not sanctified enough to put everything in the best context and in faith, trust God and so forth.

[57:40] So I understand that there will still be problems, but there can’t be an intellectual problem with Christianity or the Christian worldview if someone is going to assume an absolute distinction between good and evil and then try to argue against God, because God is the presupposition for an absolute distinction between good and evil. There are other kinds of distinctions between good and evil that you might draw without God, but there won’t be absolute ones.

[58:08] have any value in their explanation to the world without? Never. Never. And I’m glad to report that to you. You may find it hard to believe. It seems like, why unbelievers don’t fall down dead before the argument? But they never come up with anything. What they’ll say is, like secular philosophers would tell you, well, we draw the distinction between good and evil even though we don’t believe in God. Oh, yeah. I agree that you draw that distinction. It’s just on your world view the distinction doesn’t have any meaning or has no objective truth to it. Because in the end, all you’re saying is one person prefers this and the other prefers that.

[58:50] Okay, so let’s say I talk to a philosopher who says, no, wait a minute. I know that child molestation is wicked. I draw that distinction and I don’t believe in God at all. I say, oh, okay. So you subjectively draw the distinction. That doesn’t mean that child molestation is wicked, does it? Because the person who molests the child doesn’t think that it’s wicked. Okay.

[59:09] So all you’re telling me is that everybody makes choices. But what I want to know is how you can call it wicked if all you’re saying is that person chose something I didn’t choose. It’s not wicked, it’s just not your preference. That’s not your cup of tea to molest children, but it is that of others. So yeah, people will say we can draw the distinction, but they can’t ever make it an absolute distinction.

[59:34] That is objective outside of what’s our pattern from this morning? reduce it to subjectivism and skepticism. Tammy? That’s right. Right.

[59:53] Van Til would teach us, I think the Bible teaches us, that when people draw scientific conclusions, logical conclusions, ethical conclusions, that they’re implicitly referring to God in his character, his mind. And so what happens is, you get brilliant scientists who aren’t Christians, but they’re thinking, they have to think in terms of God, but then they do what? They call it nature, right? Or you have brilliant philosophers who can do all these logical deductions and they have the rules of logic. But then rather than referring them to the mind of God, they think that the rules of logic are somehow existent in themselves. For Plato in a realm beyond this world, most philosophers today aren’t that crude, but in some sense, there are principles that are not in the material world, but they’re not in God, but they’re nevertheless separate.

[60:46] Okay, so what happens is you secularize God. You take God’s holy character, which is personal, concrete. That’s why we’re angry about this mother who kills her children. Because we’re all made in the image of God and so forth. But then the secular world doesn’t want to admit there’s a God, so what do they do? They secularize that as a principle. Bingo, that’s exactly right. You take what is the creator, and you try to make the creature the measure of that now. You creature-alize, bring down to the level of the creature what is in fact the transcendent aspect of the creator.

[61:24] And so men worship their logic, their scientific methodology, or nature, or ethical principles. There are people who worship love. Not because there’s, well, I don’t know, in California there might be a temple of love somewhere, I’m not sure. Not that there’s a temple to love, eros or whatever, but people do. They give their lives for these things, right? It’s their religion. It’s that which is their ultimate concern and their final authority.

[61:58] What about when they need to appeal to nature? Okay, what they’re appealing to is what? Nature. Now, let’s just think about this.

[62:09] The natural law ethic is so ridiculous, so puerile in terms of intellectual respectability. When you look at nature, do you see any ethical principles? Does anybody? Ethical principles can’t be seen in nature. And as a matter of fact, if you want to say, no, no, you don’t see ethics, you don’t see ought out there in the world. But what is in the world, what you can describe, can be translated into an ethical principle by generalization. Well, that’s a big logical leap from what is the case to what ought to be the case.

[62:45] Most of us, I think, would approach ethics with the idea that the reason we’re studying ethics is because the world ain’t the way it’s supposed to be. So if you now go to the world to find out what it is, and then you’re going to exalt that into what it ought to be, why bother to do ethics at all?

[63:01] And then as a further step, and this is what you guys were getting at, when we do study the world and its generalizations, Is it usually the case that animals respect private property? Are animals usually monogamous and so forth? I mean, if you think that our ethical code comes from natural law, you’re being silly. On the other hand, if you believe that God has an objective principle of right or wrong, his own character, that is known, apart from personal or individual instances of, well, interpersonal relationships or dealing with property, then you’re absolutely right. But if that’s what it is, why call it natural law? Why don’t you call that God’s law? That’s God’s character that we see, and we think God himself is known through the natural order.

[63:50] But in all of these things, draw back and look at what’s common to them all. The unbelieving world takes what is God’s and tries to make it some aspect of creation, the created order. laws of logic in themselves, nature, what have you.

[64:07] Back to Van Til, I’ll reread this. But if it be said to such opponents of Christianity that unless there were an absolute God, their own questions and doubts would have no meaning at all, there is no argument in return. Van Til knows that there’s a lot of kibitzing in return. A lot of people don’t like that. But basically, there’s no way to get around that. If argument presupposes God, then you can’t argue against God successfully. There’s no argument in return because every time you try to argue you’re just insisting again.

[64:40] There’s meaning, there’s coherence, there’s unity, there’s intelligibility in the world. It is the firm conviction of every epistemologically self-conscious Christian. I love that expression. I’m waiting for the Christian bookstores to come out with the button. Are you an epistemologically self-conscious Christian?

[64:59] wouldn’t that be great yeah well yeah it’d have to be a big button to get those big words on there but what does it mean epistemologically self-conscious we’re not being arbitrary we’re not just following our emotions or feelings but we’re being reflective we’re thinking about ourselves we’re being self-conscious and we’re trying to be consistent in our theory of knowledge It is the firm conviction of every epistemologically self-conscious Christian that no human being can utter a single syllable, whether in negation or in affirmation, unless it were for God’s existence.

[65:41] So another way of putting it is, the only way you can argue with me is by talking to me, but you couldn’t utter a syllable, you couldn’t make sense out of language, without a worldview, which is the Christian worldview. Therefore, if you talk at all, you’re assuming the worldview that you’re arguing against.

[65:58] Thus, the transcendental argument seeks to discover what sorts of foundations the house of human knowledge must have in order to be what it is. That’s another one of those defining sentences here. The transcendental argument seeks to discover what sort of foundations the house of human knowledge must have in order to be what it is. We’re not arguing about what the house of knowledge is. We’re taking it for what it claims to be.

[66:29] So if I argue with somebody about induction, and I say, you know, you couldn’t use induction unless you had a broader principle, namely the existence of God who orders all things. Somebody else might come along and say, yeah, well, prove to me that I should use induction. I say, well, I’m taking the house of knowledge as it is.

[66:47] If you don’t want to use induction, I’ll talk to you about other things, namely like you can’t get away from it but on the assumption that we’re going to be inductive Van Til says then you can’t escape Christianity. The transcendental argument seeks to discover what sort of foundations the house of human knowledge must have in order to be what it is. It does not seek to find whether the house has a foundation but it presupposes that it has one. We hold that the anti-Christian method, whether deductive or inductive, may be compared to a man who would first insist that the statue of William Penn on the City Hall of Philadelphia can be intelligently conceived of without the foundation on which it stands, in order afterwards to investigate whether or not the statue really has a foundation. This was not a well-chosen illustration, because if you’re not familiar with Philadelphia and its landmarks, you’ll wonder what he’s One of the distinctive things about Philadelphia, apart from its smelliness, pardon me, I lived there three years, didn’t like it.

[67:53] The city hall has the statue of William Penns on the pinnacle. And so now Van Til is just using illustration. He goes, you can’t first conceive of this. How does he say it? A man who would insist the statue can be intelligently conceived of without the foundation in order that he might go out now and search to see if it does have a foundation. Not any statue, but the particular statue that sits that high up in the air. Now, you know that it has a foundation. Knowing that it has a foundation, then you can go search to see what it is. It turns out to be the building itself. But you can’t conceive of that statue like that, you know, first as maybe not having one at all, and then you go searching for it.

[68:36] Likewise, when we argue with people, but we’re taking for granted that this life we live is intelligible, that there’s meaning in this world, that explanation is possible, that you can give reasons for things. Van Til says, okay, now we can ask, what is that foundation? What allows us to give reasons to make sense out of our experience? It should be particularly noted, therefore, that only a system of philosophy that takes the concept of an absolute God seriously can really be said to be employing a transcendental method. A truly transcendent God and a transcendental method go hand in hand.

[69:14] You can’t use this argument for the limited God of Arminianism. Sorry, you know, Van Til’s not trying to be of a party spirit here. He’s just pointing out that if you don’t have a sovereign creator God, this argument’s not going to work. The sort of God that we’re talking about is crucial.

[69:33] he has to be an absolute God not just one who is not one who is limited by external conditions. Why does Arminianism limit God? In what way?

[69:43] Help me. The free will of man as conceived of as independent of the counsel of God. Calvinists believe men have free will. They believe God is the one who predestines what they do with their free will. They don’t believe that man’s free will is ethically able so he doesn’t have free will to make the right decisions. But anyway the Arminians as man has free will, but it’s a free will that God can’t do anything about. God just has to stand back and wait, either destroy the man or stand back and wait and see what he’s going to do with his free will. So God is conditioned by man, is limited by man. Well, Arminians in most cases are our Christian brothers and we’re not trying to be mean-spirited, but we have to point out their theology and it doesn’t enable them to have the strongest type of apologetic. But there are people that are worse than arminians and limiting god right there are religions and and views even of the christian religion that say that god is limited process theology says god is limited god’s working out his own history as the world evolves and so forth so anyway Van Til here makes it clear that you have to have a transcendent absolute god in order to have an argument that’s transcendental in character. Yes, sir?

[70:54] In my limited understanding of the philosophies by Kant, I was asking myself the question, how could they even conceive of the argument parts of the God? Don’t you have to?

[71:17] you must presuppose… If I understand what you’re saying, Scott, be correct me, please, but Kant attempts a transcendental argument. Well, we’d say he failed. See, people mustn’t think that what Kant did, Van Til now repeats and kind of spruces up. We would say Kant was trying to do the right thing to find the free conditions of intelligibility, but he didn’t find it, because he didn’t have a transcendent God. He had to break up all these things, like the concept of substance, the concept of cause. These are separate arguments for Kant, and then he has to argue that’s what the mind imposes.

[72:01] But Kant has no way of knowing, because he’s not God, he has no way of knowing that every human mind works that way. And why should every mind work the same way in a chance universe, which is what Kant thought it was. In a chaotic universe, isn’t it amazing that all human minds think in substance terms, in causal terms, in mathematical terms, and so forth? So, yeah, Kant doesn’t really have a transcendental that does the job. Well, and that’s what we’re going to be arguing. In the end, the only worldview that can present a transcendental for the meaningfulness of reason is Christianity, and that’s the best argument that we have. Aristotle uses what’s called a transcendental proof for the laws of logic, yes.

[72:44] And the difficulty is, as in Kant, let’s say, I don’t think it is as good, but for argument’s sake, let’s say Kant does have a good transcendental argument for the categories, for concepts, like causation, substance, and so forth. Let’s say Aristotle has a good one for logic. The problem is you’ve got to bring all this together. If we have, if the laws of logic are self-validated, so what?

[73:07] If you don’t have a mind that thinks the laws of logic, big deal and if you don’t have a mind that can think the laws of logic and application to a world outside the mind big deal and so you see a limited transcendental argument for this piece or that piece of intelligibility isn’t going to help if you can’t put the whole picture together and i purposely choose that word picture i’ve been saying what’s our picture of ourselves also more broadly what’s our world view how are we going to look at reality knowledge and human behavior in order to make sense out of human rationality and argument. Thank you.