Presuppositional Apologetics & Traditional Arguments

Presuppositional Apologetics and the Limits of Classical Proofs

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 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.

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.

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

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. 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.

Thomas just says this, we call God. And so if people say yes and amen, okay, fine. But just recognize you've imported massive content into the argument that's not there in the argument itself. So if we're gonna use a cause and effect argument, we're gonna have to get to the point where we say 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. So we don't, 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 God, oh, by the way, God is the only one uncaused.

He is who he is, period, the end. 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.

If we lose that, we're going to lose the biblical import of what we're doing. God may honor it anyway. There've been successful natural theological arguments from other theological persuasions. We thank the Lord for that.

I used to preach in Arminian gospel and the Lord used it anyway. So that's not the point. The point is we need to be as biblically faithful as we're able to be given what God has said to us. So I think that's the direction we need to go.

I forget the first part of your question.