Here is his post:

It became known as the Great Debate.

In 1985 the University of California at Irvine hosted a public debate between philosopher Greg Bahnsen and atheist Gordon Stein on the topic “Does God Exist?”

What Ensued

Stein came prepared to cut down traditional apologetic arguments for the existence of God, but the philosopher’s approach was unexpected. Bahnsen went on the offensive and presented the Transcendental Argument for the Existence of God: the God of the Bible must exist because no other worldview makes rational sense of the universe and logic, science, and morals ultimately presuppose a theistic worldview. He explained:

The transcendental proof for God’s existence is that without Him it is impossible to prove anything.The atheist worldview is irrational and cannot consistently provide the preconditions of intelligible experience, science, logic, or morality. The atheist worldview cannot allow for laws of logic, the uniformity of nature, the ability for the mind to understand the world, and moral absolutes. In that sense the atheist worldview cannot account for our debate tonight.

Remembering the debate, philosopher and theologian John Frame writes,

I was there, having driven up with several students from Westminster in Escondido. It was in a large lecture hall at U. C. Irvine, and the place was packed. The atmosphere was electric. I don’t know how many were Christians, but it was evident as the debate progressed that the audience became convinced that Bahnsen won the debate.

Borrowed Logic

Bahnsen’s approach focuses on the “presuppositional conflict of world views” between atheism and Christianity. In the debate he shows that his opponent has a precommitment to the rule that logic or reason is the only valid way to prove any statement. The atheist can’t prove this rule by using logic (that would be circular reasoning), or by any other method (that would be disproving the rule by using something other than logic). This is a presupposition, a fundamental belief held ahead of time that cannot be proved, but that grounds all your other beliefs. Bahnsen argues that the atheist is actually borrowing logic from the Christian worldview in order to make his claims.

In his book Van Til’s Apologetics, Bahnsen gives a formal definition of a presupposition:

A ‘presupposition’ is not just any assumption in an argument, but a personal commitment that is held at the most basic level of one’s network of beliefs. Presuppositions form a wide-ranging, foundational perspective (or starting point) in terms of which everything else is interpreted and evaluated. As such, presuppositions have the greatest authority in one’s thinking, being treated as one’s least negotiable beliefs and being granted the highest immunity to revision.

Presuppositions can be exposed and used to show that non-Christian worldviews are not rationally coherent:

The presuppositional apologist makes an internal critique of the non-Christian’s espoused presuppositions, showing that they destroy the very possibility of knowledge or ‘proof.’ He maintains that only Christianity is a reasonable position to hold and that unless its truth is presupposed there is no foundation for an argument that can prove anything whatsoever. Thus it is irrational to hold to anything but the truth of Scripture. The truth of Christianity is proved from the impossibility of the contrary (Presuppositional Apologetics: Stated and Defended).

The Impossibility of the Contrary

He also explains further about arguing from the impossibility of the contrary:

The unbeliever attempts to enlist logic, science, and morality in his debate against the truth of Christianity. Van Til’s apologetic answers these attempts by arguing that only the truth of Christianity can rescue the meaningfulness and cogency of logic, science, and morality. The presuppositional challenge to the unbeliever is guided by the premise that only the Christian worldview provides the philosophical preconditions necessary for man’s reasoning and knowledge in any field whatever.

This is what is meant by a ‘transcendental’ defense of Christianity. Upon analysis, all truth drives one to Christ. From beginning to end, man’s reasoning about anything whatsoever (even reasoning about reasoning itself) is unintelligible or incoherent unless the truth of the Christian Scriptures is presupposed. Any position contrary to the Christian one, therefore, must be seen as philosophically impossible. It cannot justify its beliefs or offer a worldview whose various elements comport with each other (Van Til’s Apologetics).

The Great Debate

Covenant Media Foundation has graciously given us permission to post the audio and transcript of the Great Debate. Take some time to listen to this audio or read the transcript for a great example of powerful Christianapologetics. It’s well worth it.

 

I was present when Doug Moo reviewed this book at ETS in 2009, and if my memory serves me correctly Moo was filling in for someone… just can’t remember who:

It was a notable moment at ETS that year and though I do respect Moo’s thoughts, click here to read the review that Andy posted.

Douglas J. Moo. Review of John M. Frame, The Doctrine of the Christian Life. 61st Annual Meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society. New Orleans, November 2009.

Moo’s conclusion:

The book is an admirable, biblically rich, and very satisfying exploration of the meaning, implications, and practical contemporary outworking of biblical law through the lens of the Decalogue. I learned a lot from it. I was challenged in my own too often superficial level of Christian obedience. And it is an important counterbalance to those who err on the side of turning Christian ethics into a vacuous and undefined call to love one another. But at the end of the day, by not focusing enough attention on the grand New Testament themes of Christ’s lordship, the work of the Holy Spirit, and the transformation of mind and heart in conformity with Christ, the book did not satisfy me as a whole and balanced description of the Christian life.

HT: Andy Naselli

Van Tilian Apologetics, Part 1 of 4

John Frame says that Reformed theologian and philosopher Cornelius Van Til (1895-1987) “is perhaps the most important Christian thinker since Calvin.”

Frame offers several qualifiers to his provocative claim:

To say that Van Til is the most important Christian thinker of our time is not to say that he is the most comprehensive thinker, or the clearest, or the most persuasive.

Certainly it is not to say (as some of his more fanatical followers assume) that he is beyond criticism.

Nor is it to say that he has had a greater impact on present-day Christian thought than anybody else; indeed, his isolation continues, and his influence remains relatively small.

So what does he mean?

It is, rather, to say that he has made the Christian community aware of its only appropriate epistemology, thus laying a necessary foundation that ought to be the basis for all subsequent Christian reflection.

To explain, Frame compares Van Til with the most important philosopher of the modern period, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Frame points out that Kant argued for the autonomy of the human mind—that the human mind is its own ultimate authority and the author of its own moral standards.

Frame writes:

Kant saw, of course, that none of this could be proved in the usual sense of proof. He adopted what he called the “transcendental method,” which seeks to determine the necessary preconditions or presuppositions of rationality. He reached his conclusions concerning human autonomy not by proving them by the usual philosophical methods, but by showing our need to presuppose them. Kant’s philosophy, therefore, does not merely assert or assume human autonomy, as did many previous philosophers; it explicitly presupposes human autonomy. It adopts human autonomy as the root idea to which every other idea must conform. That is what makes Kant unique and vastly important: he taught secular man where his epistemology must begin, his inescapable starting point for all possible reflection.

In other words, Kant

showed “modern man,” secular, would-be autonomous man, what he would have to presuppose about knowl­edge and the world in order to be consistent with his presumed autonomy. In other words, Kant made the modern sectarian “epistemologically self-conscious.” If modern man is not to bow to God, he must bow before himself; to that extent at least, he must be a Kantian.

How does this relate to Van Til?

If Kant taught the world of secular unbelief the essentials of its own (until then, subconscious) theory of knowledge (“epistemology”), Van Til did the same thing for the Christian.

As Kant said that we must avoid any trace of the attitude of bowing before an external authority, so Van Til taught that the only way to find truth at all is to bow before God’s authoritative Scripture.

As Kant presented his view transcendentally, as the inescapable ultimate presupposition of human thought, so Van Til made and defended transcendentally the same claim for the revelation of God: that God’s Word is the only presupposition that does not destroy the intelligibility of human thought.

Hence Frame’s application:

Because of Van Til, we can at last define the essential philosophical differences between the Christian and the non-Christian worldviews.

If Kant’s achievement makes him the most important secular philosopher of modern times, should we not say that Van Til’s achievement makes him the most important Christian thinker of modern times?

—John M. Frame, Cornelius Van Til: An Analysis of His Thought (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1995), pp. 44-47.

For those who want to see what this form of apologetics looks like in action, you may want to check out the 1985 debate between Greg Bahnsen and Gordon Stein. You can read a transcript of the two-hour debate here, listen to the MP3, or listen to all of it through YouTube after the jump:

Richard Dawkins was invited by the Oxford student Christian Union to defend his book The God Delusion in public debate with William Lane Craig. The invitation remained open until the last minute. However, Dawkins refused the challenge and his chair remained empty. Craig then gave a lecture to a capacity audience on the weaknesses of the central arguments of the book and responded to a panel of academics. – via Apologetics315

Reformed Theological principle of Sola Scriptura. To help us get a grip on it, we asked Dr. John Frame to help us think out the system and its consequences. Dr. Frame is Professor of Systematic Theology and Philosophy at Reformed Theological Seminary and author of 13 books, including “Cornelius Van Til: An Analysis of his Thought,” and he contributed the chapter on Presuppositionalism in Steven Cowan’s “Five Views on Apologetics.

Listen to the audio here>>

 

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“Christians are in themselves no wiser than are other men. What they have they have by grace. They must be ‘all things to all men.’ But it is not kindness to tell patients that need strong medicine that nothing serious is wrong with them. Christians are bound to tell men the truth about themselves; that is the only way of bringing them to recognize the mercy, the compassion, of Christ. For if men are told the truth about themselves, and if they are warned against the false remedies that establish men in their wickedness, then, by the power of the Spirit of God, they will flee to the Christ through whom alone they must be saved.” – C. Van Til