Presuppositional Apologetics & Traditional Arguments

Revealed Apologetics

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So could a presuppositionalist use a cosmological argument with the background knowledge that we wouldn't, this argument wouldn't work at all without the

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Christian concept, but for the purposes of the nature of the discussion, they kind of throw that argument and kind of have a conversation with the unbelievers.

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Is there a place for that? Because a lot of people think if you're doing presuppositional apologetics, even when you're using evidence, it has to look starkly different than what these classical guys are doing over here.

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What does that look like? Yeah, again, I don't think it has to look starkly different. I just think what's, you know, even

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Cajetan, the commentator of Aquinas, he said, you know, Thomas's proofs bump up against the ceiling of creation.

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They can't, you can't jump in a cause effect argument in the way that it's laid out classically, and let's just say domestically, you don't have within the argument.

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So I'm trying to be careful here. You don't have within the argument anything that allows you to jump to eternity and infinity and immutability.

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Thomas just says this, we call God. And so if people say yes and amen, okay, fine.

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But just recognize you've imported massive content into the argument that's not there in the argument itself.

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So if we're gonna use a cause and effect argument, we're gonna have to get to the point where we say

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God caused the universe. Yes, right. And that does not mean that he's subject to time or space in his causing it, all right?

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So we can't just, so now we're talking about a different kind of cause, aren't we? And we have to acknowledge that or at least know that going in so that if we're questioned who caused

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God, oh, by the way, God is the only one uncaused. He is who he is, period, the end.

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So we just have to be, I think we have to be, you know, Van Til's phrase, we just always have to be epistemologically self -conscious when we engage in these kinds of things so that we recognize from what foundation we speak.

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If we lose that, we're going to lose the biblical import of what we're doing. God may honor it anyway.

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There've been successful natural theological arguments from other theological persuasions. We thank the

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Lord for that. I used to preach an Arminian gospel and the Lord used it anyway. So that's not the point.

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The point is we need to be as biblically faithful as we're able to be, given what God has said to us.