Presuppositional apologetics

No neutral ground

Of the five roads, presuppositional apologetics asks first about starting points. Its founder was Cornelius Van Til (1895–1987), born in the Netherlands, who taught for decades at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. Everyone, he held, thinks from some final standard of what is true and what is possible: a presupposition. The Christian's final standard is God speaking in Scripture; unbelieving thought, in the end, makes the human mind its own final judge. There is no starting point that is neither, and so no neutral ground between belief and unbelief Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith.

Van Til found this in Scripture. "The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge" (Proverbs 1:7), and all knowledge has its home in Christ:

so that they may know the mystery of God, namely Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.

Colossians 2:2-3

"The treasures of wisdom are hid, not from us, but for us, in Christ," says Matthew Henry Matthew Henry. Paul warns against "philosophy and empty deception" (Colossians 2:8) and says, "we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ" (2 Corinthians 10:5). Thinking too has a Lord.

Van Til did not think that believer and unbeliever share nothing. What he denied was neutral ground, not common ground. Both live in God's world and bear God's image, and above all the unbeliever too knows God:

The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness. For what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.

Romans 1:18-19

The unbeliever knows God and holds that truth down (Romans 1:18-21). Van Til saw this knowledge as the point of contact for every conversation. It is the sense of the divine that John Calvin taught: God has given all people some idea of his Godhead, so that all, to a man, are "aware that there is a God, and that he is their Maker" Calvin, Institutes 1.3.1. Even in denying God, Van Til held, the unbeliever borrows the reason God gave him. He liked the picture of a little girl slapping her father's face, which she can do only because he holds her on his lap.

The transcendental argument and its roots

On this ground Van Til built his transcendental argument. Rather than reasoning from something in the world back to its cause, it asks what must be true for thought and knowledge to be possible at all. We trust that the laws of logic hold everywhere; we do science because we expect nature to keep its order tomorrow; we know that some things are truly wrong for anyone. These make sense, Van Til argued, only if the personal God who made and governs all things, the God of Scripture, exists. "In Your light we see light" (Psalm 36:9). So he held that the proof of Christianity is that without presupposing it one cannot prove anything at all: in this road's phrase, ‘the impossibility of the contrary’.

The method follows. First, for argument's sake, stand on the unbeliever's ground and show where its presuppositions fail to support reason and meaning. Then invite him onto Christian ground, to see that here reason, science and morality find their place. Then present Christ and call for repentance: the goal is the gospel, not a philosophical victory.

The roots of this road are in Dutch Reformed theology. Abraham Kuyper stressed that the regenerate and the unregenerate do their science from different starting points Abraham Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism 4. Yet he also taught that by common grace God restrains sin and gives all people gifts for learning and culture Kuyper, Common Grace. Herman Bavinck held that the knowledge of God is implanted in us before it is acquired by reasoning, and that the proofs of God's existence are less the foundation that produces faith than testimonies which the believer recognises in creation Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics.

Van Til's student Greg Bahnsen made the argument widely known in public debates with atheists. John Frame carried the road on in a gentler form John Frame, Apologetics to the Glory of God. He keeps the conviction that there is no neutral ground, but holds that evidence and the traditional arguments may be used freely within the Christian presupposition; a cosmological argument or the evidence for the resurrection becomes part of the transcendental case when it points to the God of Scripture. He also grants that believer and unbeliever know a great deal in common.

Strengths and criticisms

This road takes seriously what sin has done to the mind, and never treats God as a hypothesis awaiting a verdict. It goes beneath particular facts to the eyes that read them, the roots of a worldview, and shows that the unbeliever too lives by leaning on God. Christ and Scripture are at its centre from the start.

Three criticisms are made. First, that it argues in a circle, presupposing the God it ought to prove. The reply is that every final authority is defended by its own light: even the reliability of reason can only be shown by reasoning. The question is not whether there is a circle but which circle takes in all we know, and Frame commends a broad one that brings much evidence within the biblical presupposition (Isn't it circular to prove the Bible from the Bible?). Second, that without neutral ground there is nothing to talk about. The reply: Van Til never denied common ground, and Frame's gentler form gladly begins from what both know. Third, that the argument is abstract and can sound like mere assertion to people not yet persuaded. Presuppositionalists answer that the Spirit persuades, and that the argument can be put plainly: why do you trust logic, and where do right and wrong come from?

Within the Reformed tradition this road was itself a debate. B. B. Warfield of Princeton, a generation earlier, held that believer and unbeliever share a reason able to weigh the evidence, and that Christianity can and must defend itself before it (see Classical and evidential apologetics). He too held that sin darkens the mind and that the Spirit gives faith, but along with the evidence. Van Til valued Warfield's doctrine of Scripture and his conviction that the faith must be defended in public, yet judged that treating the unbeliever's reason as a neutral judge of the evidence did not fit the Reformed teaching on sin. Seen from Warfield's side, it meant only that sinners can still weigh evidence, not that reason stands neutral before God. What divided them was whether believer and unbeliever can weigh the evidence together on the same ground before the Christian starting point is accepted. This course picks neither side.

In conversation

In conversation this road invites us to look at starting points together. If a friend says he trusts only science and logic, do not mock; ask. What explains that nature will keep its laws tomorrow, that logic holds everywhere, that some things are truly wrong? The question is not to corner him but to see together that he already leans on God's world. Then speak of Christ, in whom all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden.

What is taken captive is thoughts, not people, and our own thoughts must first be captive to Christ. On 2 Corinthians 10:5 John Wesley writes that the mind, taken captive, "lays down all authority of its own" Wesley and gives itself to the obedience of faith. The next lesson, Reformed epistemology and the cumulative case, turns to belief that is rational without arguments, and to the road that gathers many clues together.

Practice