Bahnsen vs Sproul: Deep Dive Debate Review

Debate Setup and Why the Methodology Question Matters

Two powerhouses coming together to debate methods. Greg Bonson in one corner and R .C. Sproul in the other. In this video, I'm going to look at the debate and I'm going to break down what is being said, who is making the better arguments.

To do so, I've invited my friend Eli Ayala of Revealed Apologetics to join me. Why? Well, because Eli is a presuppositionalist and I am not. As a matter of fact, walking into this discussion, I think I'm definitely more on the side of Sproul.

What is going to happen? Who will prevail in this discussion? Get yourself a bowl of popcorn or better yet, get out a notepad and a pen because we're going to go super deep into apologetics, theology, and philosophy.

So let's go. First, Eli, welcome back.

Thank you so much. It's an honor and a pleasure to be back on with you.

I'm so happy to see you because it's been, I don't know, how many months since you were on and I certainly picked a great time because you're not feeling too well, a little under the.

Weather. I literally have the flu and I'm on medication. So I have Advil cold and sinus right now. So I'm actually able to do this right now. When it wears off, the show will be over by then.

So it's all good. What's so great is you're so knowledgeable about presuppositionalism that you can do this with both hands tied behind your back, blindfolded and have the flu.

That's right. I got to pull an MJ with the flu game. That's what I wanted to challenge myself. Can I do this show with you without throwing up or passing out? So we're going to see what happens.

Oh man, this is going to be a great evening. I can already tell. So Eli, the debate, Greg Bonson versus R .C. Sproul. Do you know anything about this debate? When it originally.

Took place, where it took place, stuff like that? I don't know that, although I have listened to it a while back because the topic of the debate was really interesting to me because I was kind of at a crossroads as to where I thought I landed.

I already was exposed to the presuppositional approach and I found it very attractive and very powerful. But at the same time, as with most people who get into apologetics, I mean, my access point was through that more classical methodology.

And I thought it was interesting that presuppositionalists tend to be Calvinist, but R .C. Sproul was a Calvinist and a classicalist. So I always thought that was interesting. I don't know the background of the debate, but I'm very familiar with the actual.

Discussion itself. So I was actually probably going to bring this up later, but you already did. So we can talk about it just for a brief moment, then we'll jump into the discussion. But I do get the sense that a lot of Christians, maybe a lot of Christians on YouTube, they really do think that that's where the breakdown is.

If you're a Calvinist, then you must be a presuppositionalist. If you're not a Calvinist, you must be everything else. You must be an evidentialist, you must be a whatever. And I guess that's not the case because R .C. Sproul was a classical apologist.

He was an evidentialist along the lines of like B .B.

Warfield. Yes, yes, you can be a Calvinist and a classicalist. I think the debate here, and this is where R .C. Sproul and Bonson disagreed, who is applying Calvinistic theology consistently, right? One of the concerns that R .C. Sproul raises in his opening statement is, he says, here's one of my concerns.

Sproul says he's concerned about the loss of the purity of Calvinism by an intrusion of neo-orthodoxy within Calvinistic methodology. And so he believed presuppositionalism kind of brought to the table something very anti-rationalistic and anti-Calvinistic.

So he thinks that a consistent outflow in terms of methodology from a Calvinist theology is a classical approach, and of course, Bonson is going to sharply disagree with him there.

It sounds like the debate was recorded on the surface of the moon. I mean, that's how bad the audio is. So I actually tried to touch it up a bit with some of my software, so this is the best I could do.

I included some sound effects in case we hear something interesting. So check this out. Right? There we go. And what about this one? Let me see. Warning. Theological error. Yeah. Theological error. There we go.

And then finally. Let's get ready to stumble. Yeah. Game on. I love it. I love it.

You got all these cool special effects, man. On my show, I have to actually just do a voice. I don't have all the cool little bells and whistles there.

You have the flu, so I'm not going to ask you to do your impersonations, although you do have some, and they're excellent. Okay. Well, I appreciate that. Okay. Maybe that'll come later. Let the spirit lead.

Let the spirit lead. We're going to jump into the discussion right around the 39-minute mark, because I think that's where the back and forth starts to get good.

Fideism, Natural Theology, and the Charge of Subjectivism

What I had originally prepared for tonight, but which time did not permit to do, was to give a brief historical preconception of the historical rise of Fideism as an alternative to natural theology.

So this is Sproul talking, just so we're all on the same page. Method, metaphysics, philosophy, theology.

What I was having in mind there was that from a methodological perspective, neo-orthodoxy is noted, particularly Bart, for its very stringent rejection of natural theology, and by its replacing natural theology with a fideistic approach or defense of the Christian faith.

I am very much afraid of that method's broader implications. I don't know how exactly I said that in enumerating my concerns. But to state the differences as sharply as I can, in terms of a statement of concern—and I have to guard my words carefully here, because I'm—.

So I feel like I should stop right here, because this is super inside baseball, and I'm barely keeping track. The sound is better, but it's still not good. It sounds like Sproul is saying that the rejection of natural theology by Christians in history has led to presuppositionalism.

And maybe that's too reductionistic to say it that way, but I think that's what Sproul is saying, is out of this rejection of natural theology came fideism, which fideism, you know, we mentioned it. It's kind of that, you know, Kierkegaardian form of faith, it's a blind leap in the dark kind of faith that is disconnected from reason, which, again, links kind of arguably back to the moment that Kant severed the numinal from the phenomenal.

I don't know if we want to get into that. But anyway, it sounds like that's what Sproul is saying. So then, if that's the case, then the only thing that Christians can do at this point is just have faith, and that's Sproul's problem.

What do you think about that?

Right. I think you nailed it right there on the head. He thinks that presuppositionalism stinks of neo-orthodoxy, and the particular brand of neo-orthodoxy, which places emphasis upon fideistic subjective opinion based upon a dogmatic assertion, you know, you believe it because I say it, right?

But again, that just misses the whole point. It's not fideism. It's so not fideism. It is more not fideism than R .C. Sproul's own position. And again, you can disagree, someone could disagree with presuppositionalism, but what the presuppositionalist is trying to do is argue for certainty.

We can make a distinction here, Nate. There is a difference between psychological certainty and epistemic certainty. These are big fancy phrases. They mean very simple things. So psychological certainty is our mental state.

I'm pretty certain, psychologically speaking, my wife is in the next room. She's sleeping. I could be wrong about that. I could be wrong about the things I'm psychologically certain about. But when we speak of epistemic certainty, we're talking about the sort of certainty that I cannot be wrong about.

And a transcendental argument, at least within the project of what Vantill is trying to do and Vance is trying to do, he's trying to give us an argument that gives us epistemic certainty. Now, it's not arbitrary.

Fideism is arbitrary. If he's going to compare presuppositionalism with kind of like the neo-orthodox Kierkegaardian kind of argumentation in which we just assert by faith and dogmatic assertion, yeah, that's arbitrary.

But what does it mean for something to be arbitrary? To be arbitrary means that you don't have a good reason for the thing you're asserting. But when you push the presuppositionalist, well, that's arbitrary.

No, I have a good reason for asserting the truth of the Christian worldview, and here it is. When you reject the Christian worldview, you lose the foundation for knowledge, science, history, philosophy, logic, and anything meaningful and intelligible because all of those things require a context of interpretation in which they're meaningful.

And that's where we argue for our worldview. Our worldview perspective gives meaning to those things, and we're willing to argue about those things. But in the way that we do that, we are not going to grant autonomous and neutral assumptions.

And so that's where I think R .C. is mistaken. It doesn't lead to fideism and neo-orthodoxy and things like that.

Yeah, no, it's good. All right, let's keep going. I am not saying,.

I'm glad you asked that question, that anybody who's a presuppositionalist is neo-orthodox. They're either neo-orthodox, crypto-Bartian, or crypto-existentialist. I don't mean to say that at all. I want to make that very, very clear.

But I am afraid of the implications of the method for these reasons. I think that, first of all, the presuppositionalist approach gives the pagan an excuse for his rejection of God because the pagan is sharp enough to see the fallacy of circular reasoning upon which presuppositionalism is established.

Okay, so there it is, right? And I'll give you a moment to comment here. Is the admittedly circular form of argument that presuppositionalists employ in apologetics a fallacy?

No. We have to make a distinction between circular reasoning and circular argument. Circular reasoning is not the same as circular argument. You can engage in circular reasoning, and I think everyone does this at the ultimate level.

Bonson says, even in this very discussion, all chains of argumentation will trace back to starting points which are taken as self-evident. Circularity at this level will be unavoidable. And that's just the fact.

If you're going to start with reason, well, give me a reason why we should start with reason. Bonson points out in another lecture, he says, we do not correct our eyes, when there's an issue with our eyes, with our eyes closed.

We correct our eyes while using our eyes. We don't correct our eyes by closing our eyes, right? So when we're dealing with chains of argumentation that go back to a starting point, there's going to be an element of circularity.

But circular reasoning at that ultimate level is not a fallacy. What's a fallacy is circular argumentation in terms of which you have the conclusion of an argument in one of the premises. But as I showed you when I gave the transcendental argument in a deductive form, for example, if knowledge is possible, the Christian worldview is true.

Knowledge is possible, therefore the Christian worldview is true. There's a level of circularity there in terms of my reasoning, because I believe that the Christian worldview is the necessary precondition for the very meaningfulness of that argument itself.

But the conclusion is not stated in any of the premises. So it's not fallacious in that argumentative sense. And of course, it's not fallacious in the reasoning sense, because you have to reason with circularity when you're dealing with ultimate commitments.

So I'm tracking what you're saying. Now I'm trying to get into the mindset of Sproul, which probably is impossible. So then why—he essentially sounds like an atheist interlocutor at this point. You know, it's a

Is that the issue that the the is that What's going on, do you think?

Well, when the unbeliever points out the fact that we have presuppositions, the presuppositionalist doesn't recoil and say, oh my goodness, he found out that I am presupposing the truth of the Christian worldview.

The thing is, we lay out our presuppositions, these are my commitments, I put my faith—and this is the language of the Christian, right? I place my faith and trust the God that I know and his revelation.

Those are my presuppositions, and the nature of those presuppositions is that they are self-attestingly true. Why? Because they're ultimate commitments. You do not demonstrate the truth of your ultimate commitments by appealing to something more ultimate than they.

Now theologically, they are self-attestingly true because they come from God. When God swore to Abraham, with respect to in the Old Testament when he's making a covenant with Abraham, the Bible says that God swore by himself because there was none greater than to swear by.

And so if that's true, we have in Scripture this idea of the absolute ultimate God who speaks with authority, and what he speaks is self-attestingly true. Well, that's arbitrary. You can't just assert that.

I know, and that's why I'm not merely asserting it. Here is the other half of the coin, that when you reject the revelation of this absolute sovereign God who gives meaning and context to everything, then your position is reduced to absurdity.

Here's how, and then we interact with their worldview that is based upon a denial of the God that we're arguing for. So we don't run away from the facts. We can say, you know, tell me one thing that you know, unbeliever, and I'm going to ask you, what are the necessary preconditions?

What must be true in order for that thing that you think, you know, to be meaningful? And so what we do is we critique the unbeliever's framework with which he makes sense out of the things he thinks he knows.

And this is where you get into what we call internal critiques. Abraham Kuyper is correct. I have a worldview. The unbeliever has a worldview. There is no neutrality. Everything that the unbeliever is going to say is going to be filtered through the lens of my ultimate commitment.

And like fashion, when I tell the unbeliever, you never believe what happened, the Lord was so faithful. I was sick and they prayed for me and I'm healed. And what is he going to do? He's going to take that and he's going to filter it through his unbelieving perspective.

There is no neutrality. So the only way to engage in a meaningful critique of the unbeliever's position without simply asserting the truth of Christianity and leaving it at that is through an internal critique.

And an internal critique is when we hypothetically grant the truth of the other position and show that on its own basis, it falls apart. And at that moment, we can talk about anything. We can talk about facts.

We can talk about science. We can talk about any specific data point. And we're just going to point down to what are you standing on? What are you assuming? What are you presupposing when you assert any meaningful statement about any of those things?

And then we hear what they say and we interact with gentleness.

And respect. And this is where a non-believer says things like, well, the laws of logic are a brute fact. Which is interesting because in terms of form, they're doing the same thing that a presuppositionalist would do.

It's just that they're not going far enough.

Circular Reasoning, Ultimate Commitments, and the Transcendental Argument

Well, Nate, I'm glad you said that. One of my goals when I do debates, and I don't do a lot of them. I've done a couple of them that people can watch them on my YouTube channel. Really? But when I was green, I think I did well, but that's when I was starting off.

But one of the things I try to do is to show that I'm not the only presuppositionalist debating. I believe everyone, Nate, is a presuppositionalist. You have your Bible too, atheist. You have your ultimate commitment that you are taking it self-attestingly true, i .e. brute, right?

It's just a brute fact. Really? Well, if you read Vantill, you said you're reading Vantill. He's got a couple of interesting little quotes and nuggets you might want to put in your back pocket. Vantill famously said, he said that brute facts are mute facts.

Facts don't speak. Facts need to be interpreted. Now, the fact that he admits that there's brute facts already shows that he's not neutral because the Christian world, he says there are no brute facts.

So here you go. In your assertion of brute factuality, you are indirectly saying that the Christian position or my position is wrong because I don't believe there are brute facts. Every fact requires God.

There is no fact that has meaning independent of the father of the facts who created them and gives them the meaning that they have. And so I could argue with the unbeliever like this, and I don't have to step away from the authority of the Bible.

I've heard well-known apologists who say, we have to remember this, folks. When we argue with the unbeliever, what's one thing we can't use? And everyone in the audience will say, the Bible. And they'll be like, yeah, that's right.

We can't assume the Bible. That's not how I see the scriptures teaching how we should engage unbelievers. We stand on the truth of God's word, and we show the folly of rejecting that. And we don't argue in terms of probability.

Bonson was correct. He says apologetics is not merely dealing with probability. He says we can know without a doubt whatsoever that the Lord Jesus is the Christ. The gospel comes so that we may know with certainty.

Quoting Luke 4, 1 Thessalonians 1 .5, the Bible speaks of perfect faith, not marred by any doubt. Colossians 2 .2, Hebrews 6 .11, Romans 4 .19 -21 speaks of Abraham's certain faith. Funny thing that I think is interesting, Nate, and I'll stop blabbing here, is that the way the Bible speaks about the certainty that we can have is not the way a lot of Christian apologists, popular apologists speak.

The God that we cry and we lift our hands and worship like, oh my goodness, this God has changed my life. It seems like we're talking about a different God when we're defending him out in the world. The God that we know with a certainty, that we cry when we feel his presence, we then turn around and talk to the atheist.

Well, God most likely exists. Well, what happened when you were enjoying his presence? What happens when you know God? Are you sure you know God? Knowledge requires a justified, true belief. Is it true that you know God, or is it probably true that you know God?

I think there's an interesting inconsistency going on there, but go ahead.

Yeah, you're bringing up these other touch points that I do want to talk with you about, but I think that we have space to do this later. Let's jump back into the discussion.

I don't like to have the pagan have that excuse to say, hey God, the reason I didn't believe in you is because all those that were defending you gave me an argument that violated formal canons of logic.

Second of all, when we start our argument by the direct affirmation and assertion and existence of God, we are in a real dangerous bind of subjectivism. I just say God is. That's my starting point. There is a God.

The authority by which I say that, humanly speaking, in terms of the argument, is the fact that I'm the one who's saying it. If I don't have an objective, evidential basis for that, that we call subjectivism.

It's a matter of a decision of faith that is not resting upon objective criteria of evidence. That is what I meant by the intrusion of an existential or neo-Orthodox method into theology and philosophy.

God forbid that I should ever call Dr. Van Till or any of his disciples existentialists. I don't believe that.

Who gets to decide what is the objective standard and criteria of evidence? That's the thing. Yeah, I believe you need an objective criteria. Bonson wouldn't say that you don't need an objective criteria, but is that objective criteria a neutral criteria?

If it is, the Christian shouldn't be engaging in neutrality. If it is, neutrality is impossible. We can pretend that we can be neutral and talk with the unbeliever as though there are these things we could agree over, or we can just show our hands at the beginning, say we have commitments, you have commitments too.

Let's see whose commitments can make sense out of these objective standards of criteria for evidence and things like that. I think he's misunderstanding the issues here.

The shortness that he's already mentioned about the word of God. But the only argument I hear so far in the priest's abolitionist apologetics is I start with the assertion of the existence of God, which assertion is precisely the issue under dispute.

And I offer no evidence. I just say that's the way it is. That's good evangelism. But I think it's the death blow fatal to apologetics as a reply to the pretenders to truth that Greg has so beautifully described.

He's correct. Nate, he's correct. That would be the death knell, but that's not what the presuppositionalist is doing.

There is a bit of talking past each other. Well, so Bonson hasn't had a chance to talk yet, so I guess we'll let him say some things. Let me back up. When we talked about doing this kind of a thing, I was like, why don't we just do a debate reaction in the vein of videos that we've done before?

And as I started looking at this conversation, because I had to listen to a bit of it to try to find out where to start and stop it and where to find where the real clash was. The trick that I do with debate teacher stuff is I try to squash down formal rules on top of more informal style debates.

And I get away with it because they do at least track the ones that I've looked at more along the lines of formality. This kind of discussion with Bonson and Sproul, it feels more like an unbelievable episode with Justin Brierley.

You know what I mean? And so this is not a cross-examination by any stretch. It sounds more like a first rebuttal or something. So that's the issue. I want to say something nice about Sproul. I like how he frames the discussion, because he's done this a couple times in the entire thing, where he says, basically, look, what's going on here is fideism versus evidentialism.

Or this is what he says, I'm hearing a lot from Bonson, but I'm not hearing a clear argument. That's what he just said for his methodology. And he includes these rejoinders from Bonson in his own little speech.

I saw you nodding your head. But what he's doing is he's setting the table to speak for how everyone listening is supposed to understand this discussion. And I've said this before, and I'll say it again, but the framework that you lay down as an opponent, more often than not, whoever lays a better one wins.

And I'm not saying that that's the right thing or the good thing. I'm just saying that's the way it is. But anyway, what are your thoughts.

On Sproul? Well, I like how you said that, laying the framework. I've seen so many episodes of your show, I knew that's where you were going. I think R .C. Sproul is doing a good job in laying a framework.

It's just not the correct framework. I mean, he just doesn't understand the nature of the presuppositional argument. And that would be true if I was on his side in apologetic methodology. If I knew what I knew about presuppositionalism and I was a classicalist, I would say, nope, R .C., you're wrong.

That's not what they're saying. They're wrong. Their argument doesn't do what they think it does, but that's not what they're saying. And so I think he's laying a good framework, but it's not landing, especially with people who know the issues.

It's not landing because a transcendental argument is an argument. When you say you don't give evidence, you're just saying, there is evidence. Here's the evidence. Reject the Christian worldview and look what happens.

That's evidence. That's a form of evidence, at least. That's the impossibility of the contrary or something, right? Right. And you can demonstrate the impossibility of the contrary by bringing up various illustrations of the point of what you're trying to get at.

You see this in Bonson's debates with Gordon Stein and Edward Tabach. They were two very different debates, believe it or not, that in the debate with Gordon Stein, Bonson is heavily relying upon the laws of logic, that the Christian God is the necessary precondition for logic.

And when he's debating with Edward Tabach, he's using transcendental reasoning, but his focus shifts from the laws of logic to induction. You can shift to anything if you want to talk about beauty. What are the necessary preconditions for beauty?

So he's not avoiding the evidence. He wants to look at the evidence, but we do not look at the evidence independent of our presuppositions. I get this all the time. When I hear debates between people who use the traditional arguments, cosmological, teleological, these sorts of things, and then you listen to a presuppositionalist, notice the type of things they talk about.

On the one hand, the classicalists will argue over science and the evidence and this study over here and that study over here. When you listen to the presuppositionalists, they're talking about the very fabric of reality itself.

What does it even mean to say that something is meaningful? And I think that's one of the benefits of presuppositionalism. It gets right to the root without spending too much time on the surface issues because the issue isn't the evidence.

The issue is we're looking at the evidence differently. I mean, you see this in evolutionary debate, right, where you take a look at fossils and you see similarity between the fossils. You see what's called homological structures where there's a similarity.

You can kind of see through the fossils that there seems to be some kind of evolutionary relationship, right? But why is it the case that an atheistic evolutionist who is looking at the fossils sees homological structures, these similarities, as evidence for evolutionary relationship?

And then here comes along the Bible-believing Christian who believes that God created all things. He sees these same homological structures and says, oh man, look, God created these creatures with similar physical features.

How on earth do two people look at the same thing and come to completely different conclusions? The issue is not the evidence. The issue is the presuppositions that we bring to the evidence. And I think R .C. Sproul's missing.

That. What do you think about his comment about subjectivism? Again, I'm trying to get into his mind here a little bit. He talked about subjectivism. And I guess I think the concern that Sproul has is that by starting off with God's existence, accepting God's existence, which I take it he would mean on faith in the presuppositional scheme, then you are not beginning in objectivity.

So that's where the word you had already sort of clashed with that. You're not beginning there. You're beginning in subjectivism because faith is subjective, you know. There is no objective argument for a Christian's personal trust in God, but there is an objective argument for the existence of God.

One is subjective, the other is objective. Like, how do you respond to that?

Yeah, this is the claim that the presuppositionalist is confusing ontology with epistemology. We are starting with ontology, okay, and then we're confusing ontology with epistemology. I'm talking about the epistemology aspect.

So you have to start with yourself, R .C. would say. You don't actually start with God, right? You have to start with your thinking process, right? But again, the presuppositionalist is not confusing the two.

We recognize that the ontology, one's metaphysical assumptions about the nature of reality, and the epistemology, our theory of knowledge, which for the presuppositionalist is revelational. We believe all knowledge is revelational.

It is not an either or. You either start with yourself or start with God. We say we start with both. You cannot meaningfully speak of epistemology without presupposing metaphysical commitments, and you cannot presuppose metaphysical commitments without already having an epistemology or theory of knowledge connected to that.

So we're not confusing the two. We hold them in tandem. It's a false dichotomy to say you either start with yourself or you start with God. I would say why is that my only option? I can say we start with both simultaneously, and it is only if we start with both that I could make a distinction between what we call our proximate starting point, my mind, and my ultimate starting point, the God who reveals.

Okay? And there is that. It's a very important distinction. Bonson wouldn't deny that we have to start with ourself. Of course. I have to utter, God exists, right? But that's not my ultimate starting point.

It's only my ultimate starting point that can give meaning to my proximate starting point because my ultimate starting point is the necessary precondition for the meaningfulness of my proximate starting point.

That's just to say, Nate, and I'll stop here, that God and revelation is necessary to even understand my intellectual activities in which I start in a proximate sense, making arguments and.

Making assertions and things like that. Boy, a number of things that Sproul is saying is just talking past Bonson. I can even track this. Bonson, I guess, at this point, what I would be looking for as his debate coach is for Bonson to clearly explain why Sproul has mischaracterized presuppositionalism or else this would not be a fruitful conversation.

Right. I think Bonson.

Would demonstrate that by quoting from Van Til to show Van Til's not actually doing what Sproul says he's doing. So that would be one of the ways he can show that R .C. Sproul's understanding of presuppositionalism is off, and so his criticisms fall flat.

But then again, he's going to have to give some kind of argument as well. Let's see what he does. I think we have another problem with.

Confusion, volatility, and epistemology, which I'm sure this discussion will get at sooner or later, but that's answering your question. Would you wish to say something, Professor Bonson? Yes.

By the way, Bonson is a beast, right? He annihilated, annihilated Gordonstein, and so I expect an excellent response from Bonson here.

Bonson’s Reply: Fideism, Circularity, and the Christian Worldview

In the first place, I want to make very clear that the position I hold in apologetics and the position advocated for over 40 years by Dr. Van Til is by no means whatsoever, and it is highly inappropriate to use the word in the same room, fideism.

It is not subjectivism. It is not anti-rationalism. It is not a denial of objective criteria and grounds for belief. In fact, you will find strenuous statements in Dr. Van Til's literature, as you will find in my limited literature, due to the fact that there is an objective argument for the existence of God, that it is inescapable, and no man has rational grounds to think that he can reject it.

So that's not fideism at all. Not at all. It doesn't come close to subjectivism. It doesn't give the pagan an excuse either, because it doesn't say to him that we have one circle here and another circle there, or I guess, you know, different strokes for different folks.

Take the one you want. That isn't the presuppositionalist argument. The argument is your reasoning in a circle, and it's a destructive circle. And I may be reasoning in a circle, but it's one which encompasses your thought and everything valid in your thought, as well as all other things.

It gives science a foundation. Now, this word about presuppositional and circular argumentation needs to be expanded just a bit more. Let us say that I, as a Christian, am dealing with a man who is a committed and exhausted empiricist.

He believes that sense perception is the test of all truth whatsoever. All right, so his ultimate presupposition is that sense perception….

Is he writing on a blackboard, Eli? Oh yes, yes. Oh, man. By the way, R .C. Sproul famously taught using a chalkboard even up until, like, our modern time. He loved doing it, and it just had an effect of snapping.

You could hear the chalk snapping down on the…. He did it even, like, up until, like….

To have been in that room and seen this with our own eyes, man, that would have been really great.

…is the standard of truth. Now, consider a man who wants to debate with the empiricist at this point, and he brings an argument—we'll call it argument A—to bear on the empiricist. And another man comes into the room, and he uses argument B with the empiricist.

Now, if argument A is, in fact, predicated on an ultimate presupposition which denies that sense perception is the standard of truth, and the empiricist buys argument A, would you please notice that he can only buy that argument by rejecting his presupposition?

You could stop right there, Nate.

Sure. Because I'm thinking my teacher is coming out. I want to make sure people are following. He's showing, for example, that if someone is an empiricist, which is an epistemological position which says all knowledge comes through sensation, right, and experience.

If someone were to say, all knowledge—just to illustrate the point of what Bonson is saying, the irrationality of that position—if someone is saying all knowledge comes through sensation, okay, we can simply ask the question, which sensation did you use to come to that conclusion?

And of course, the very moment the empiricist opens their mouth to give you an answer to that question, he's now going to demonstrate that he's actually denying his standard of the fact that all knowledge comes through sensation.

Well, you didn't learn that truth through a sensation, okay? So if that statement is true, all knowledge comes through sensation, it's false because you didn't come to learn that through sensation. And so he's trying to show you that certain presuppositions that we have, it's not meaningful to assert a position and then, in your defense of that position, deny the very position you've asserted.

And so he's trying to show the incoherency of an empirical.

Outlook. Right. And in order for two people with two different presuppositions about reality to agree with each other, someone is going to have to deny their presupposition, or at least a component of it, you know?

That's right. So then I take it what he means to say is, how can a Christian and a non-believer who both start from two entirely different presuppositions agree with each other unless someone denies their starting point?

That's right. Well, let me—okay, so let me try to—okay, I'm a brother now, so let's do this 1 Corinthians 13 style. Isn't that assuming that Bonson's characterization is accurate? That what's going on when a Christian talks to a non-believer is that they are starting with two different presuppositions?

Because I think I just heard Bonson say that—well, help me, maybe I didn't hear that—what he said was that the non-believer is standing inside the Christian circle. He said that the Christian circular reasoning encompasses the non-believer's reasoning.