The Transcendental Argument

Introduction to Presuppositional Apologetics and the Guest’s Background

All right, welcome back to another episode of Revealed Apologetics. I'm your host, Elias Ayala. You do not have to call me Elias, that's my full name. My friends call me Eli, so just throw that out there.

And I always say I'm super excited to be on because I have such a wonderful guest and we talk about some really interesting stuff. But I am especially happy to have with us today, Dr. James Anderson from Reformed Theological Seminary.

And we're gonna be talking a little bit about presuppositional apologetics and transcendental arguments. And so we are going to be in for a doozy. If you're an introductory kind of a guy to all of this sort of stuff, don't worry.

We will have Dr. Anderson define kind of the basic parameters of how this methodology works. But then, I did not tell Dr. Anderson this, but we will be going under the assumption that the folks who are listening have some degree of background in the topic.

So please don't hesitate if you need to go into some philosophically deep weeds. Most of the people who are listening in will be familiar with you and the related topics. So with that said, just a quick announcement.

I know a lot of people were bummed that I had scheduled Jeff Durbin to talk about presuppositional apologetics applied to competing religious systems. And that fell through because of some personal issues with Jeff, nothing crazy or serious.

But he did reach out to me and we will be rescheduling. And so I'll let folks know when that is going to happen. We also will be having Dr. Gary Habermas on the 12th. So definitely not a presuppositionalist, but as you have heard me before, I do think that we can have very fruitful interaction with people from different apologetic traditions.

I think there's great benefit to interacting with each other's materials in that regard. So we also have Emilio Ramos, who will be talking about the connection between presuppositionalism and reformed theology.

And how those work together. Why do presuppositionalists tend to be reformed in their theology? We'll explore a little bit of that on May 16th at 1 p .m. Eastern. All right, and I believe that's it. Oh, we might be having Jason Lyle on as well.

Jason Lyle might be coming on or working on that in the background. So with all that being said, let us no longer keep Dr. Anderson away. And he's looking at me, what's this guy talking about? Dr. Anderson, why don't you introduce yourself to folks and tell us a little bit about yourself?

How James Anderson Came to Christianity

Sure, well, first of all, Eli, thank you for having me on your shows and your experience. I'm really excited. So my background is I'm from the UK originally, but I've lived in the United States for 11 years now, teaching at Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte, North Carolina, teaching theology and philosophy, apologetics, ethics.

My PhD thesis was in the area of philosophical theology, specifically the idea of paradoxes in Christian theology. And it was somewhat inspired by some comments that Cornelius Van Til made, although it wasn't specifically a defense of his views, but inspired by them.

And yeah, I regard myself as a Van Tilian presuppositionalist, although I think that's a broad category and people understand that in different ways. I don't know, maybe we'll get into some of the fine distinctions there.

And yeah, so I also have a family, wife, three wonderful children. And anything else you wanna know at this point or is that enough? Well, but that's good.

I did wanna ask you real quick without going into so much details, because obviously one can go into their life story, but how did you become a Christian?

I was raised in a Christian home by Christian parents and basically evangelicals on my mother's side and really sort of went into my teenage years under the assumption that I was a Christian. I believed all the right things.

I did all the right things. I never rebelled, but it really wasn't until I was 15 years old, went to a summer camp and basically through a series of providential events was very challenged with the words of Christ in Luke 11, 23, where he says, he who is not for me is against me.

And I realized there's a fork in the road here. You can't be indifferent. And I wasn't sure at that point that I really was for Christ. I wasn't sure that at a level of personal heart commitment that I really had committed myself fully to Christ.

And so that was sort of a spiritual crisis moment. And I think that that was a turning point. Now, that wasn't the only major spiritual experience that I had during my high school years, but I think that was a decisive one.

And I certainly consider that to be something of a personal conversion point for me. Yeah, well, very good.

I think that's also, when we do these kinds of discussions that can be highly philosophical and theological, I think it's very important to ground everything in our relationship with Christ, that it's more than just about that intellectual aspect, not that we separate them, but I like to hear a little bit about the folks' backstories because it also explodes the caricature that all Christians are just ignoramuses.

You're a fairly intelligent guy and here you are a believer in Christ and you engage in some fine scholarship. So I think it'd be cool for people to kind of hear that about you. So, all right, well, let's jump right in then.

Let's throw a bone to the people who might be listening in and they're kind of just like, well, I heard about this channel and I'm interested in this apologetic stuff, but they might not be familiar with what presuppositional apologetics is.

What Presuppositional Apologetics Is

Now, all they need to do is listen to past episodes via the podcast. If you haven't subscribed, stop everything you're doing right now and go and subscribe to Revealed Apologetics on iTunes and YouTube.

So if you haven't done that already, you are a living demonstration of total depravity. Anyway, so what would you say is a good summary of presuppositional apologetics to someone who hears that and says, that sounds really complicated and annoying?

Ha ha, well, presuppositional apologetics is a term for a methodology in apologetics that focuses on presuppositions. That is the foundational assumptions that people make. And I think there's a number of ways you can unpack presuppositional apologetics, but I favor unpacking in terms of worldviews.

So recognizing that everyone has a worldview, whether they realize it or not, whether they're consciously reflected on it or not, but they have a series of presuppositions. Presuppositions about God, presuppositions about reality, about knowledge, about truth, about their own rational faculties, about right and wrong.

Now, these may be poorly formed presuppositions. They may not be very aware of them, but people basically have worldviews. They have frameworks through which they interpret their experiences. And what presuppositionalism does in effect is says that only one worldview can be right.

Okay, so there's only one right way to view the world. There's only one right set of presuppositions through which to rightly experience the world. And the Christian worldview is that right one. But of course, that's not an argument to simply say the Christian worldview is right one, but there's a methodology which focuses on an internal critique of worldviews.

And you can get a little into the weeds about what form this internal critique takes, but fundamentally, if you're following the sort of Vantillian school of presuppositionalism, the argument is that a non-Christian worldview cannot make sense of rationality itself.

It cannot make sense of our ability to know things, to reason about the world, to have rational beliefs, to have access to truth. So it is a kind of epistemological argument that says what can account for human knowledge in the first place?

What can account? What kind of worldview can make sense of our ability to reason and have knowledge? And the Christian theistic worldview, the biblical theistic worldview is that worldview. And you have to follow the argument through.

It takes a little bit of work to identify what are some of the preconditions of human knowledge, of human reason? But that's basically the argument, that the Christian worldview can make sense of our ability to reason and argue and various non-Christian worldviews.

We could talk about different varieties of non-Christian worldview cannot account for it. But a presuppositional argument focuses on a sort of internal epistemological critique of the presuppositions of an unbeliever.

Right, and I believe you can strip the philosophical language from that and just apply it to everyday situations. So people are listening to epistemological and all that kind of transcendental sort of stuff.

There is a way to kind of take this to the streets as Greg Bonson used to say. So we don't always have to talk in these terms but they are helpful nonetheless when we're discussing these issues. Another thing you said, which I greatly appreciate because I'm not sure how familiar you are with how presuppositionalism is usually played out in the popular arena.

But you said that stating that the Christian worldview provides the necessary preconditions for intelligibility or however you said it, is not an argument. There needs to be more heavy lifting and more expanding upon that because popularly speaking, a lot of people will tout that phrase around as though they've made an argument.

And of course the unbeliever looks at them like they have 12 heads. So I think that's a very important point that you made there. So now folks who usually dive into presuppositionalism usually hear names thrown around.

I'm a Vantillian or I'm a Framian or I'm a Bonsonian which a lot of people would say, well, that's pretty much being a Vantillian. And they were like, well, not quite. And then they go back and forth.

How would you briefly define the differences between say a Vantill or maybe perhaps, maybe I'm incorrect here. We may lump Bonson in there unless you think he has a different emphasis there. I mean, Bonson would say, I'm all Vantill here.

What's the difference between a Vantill, Bonson and say someone like a Framian and maybe yourself?

Van Til, Bahnsen, and Frame on Transcendental Argumentation

Okay, so the moment you step into that, you're committing yourself to a particular interpretation of Vantill. So Bonson and Fram would interpret Vantill's claims somewhat differently. Or they might say, here's what counts as a Vantillian presuppositionalist.

They might define it differently. I think Vantill's approach is actually quite hard to pin down in some areas. But what we can say is that on the one hand, he's a critic of a traditional method that adopts a sort of neutral epistemology in order to make its case.

And he takes the view that you have to argue on the basis of a Christian epistemology. And the centerpiece, I don't think there's any dispute about this, that the centerpiece of Vantill's approach to apologetics is a transcendental argument, which is this presuppositional internal critique that I was talking about earlier.

But transcendental argument seeks to show, as Vantill puts it, it asks what are the foundations of the house of human knowledge? And then seeks to show that those foundations are Christian theistic foundations.

So that's the idea of the transcendental argument. But it seems that Vantill still allowed for historical evidential arguments. But the important thing was that these evidential arguments aren't offered in a presuppositional vacuum.

They're offered as part of a broader presuppositional or worldview-oriented case. So there are nuances, and I think there's a certain reductionist approach to Vantill that I don't think is very helpful.

Now, on the Barnesian side, it's transcendental argument or bust, really. So Barneson's approach is to focus entirely on a transcendental argument for the existence of God, or TAG as it's commonly abbreviated.

And Barneson had a sort of triad of arguments that he illustrated this with. So the argument from morality, the argument from logic, and the argument from science that seemed to be the main focus for Barneson.

And Barneson was very critical of any other kind of theistic argument. Famously, he critiqued R .C. Sproul's book on classical apologetics, and that's the very book, yes. So Barneson has a very critical review of that.

And the upshot of it is that no theistic arguments are cogent of the transcendental argument. That seems to be his position. But also, there are elements, while Barneson seems to say, I'm straight down the line, Vantillian, I think it's fair to say there are elements of Vantill's overall thought that you do not find much represented in Barneson.

One is the element of paradox. So Vantill seems quite open that there are paradoxical elements to the Christian faith, and he outlines a number of these. And you don't hear Barneson saying a lot about that.

It sort of gets kept in the background. He does acknowledge it at a few points. The other thing is Vantill talks a lot about the problem of the one and the many, and the ontological trinity as the solution to the problem of the one and the many.

And this seems very important to Vantill as part of this transcendental argument. And again, with Barneson, you don't find that much mentioned or much developed. In his big Vantill book, he does have a section on it, but it doesn't seem to feature in his applied apologetics much.

So I think there are some elements of Vantill that Barneson wasn't all that enthusiastic about or didn't quite know what to do with. And so they're left somewhat in the background. Then you have someone like John Frame, who is more critical of Vantill on some points.

So he openly distances himself from Vantill. And Frame, while he endorses transcendental argumentation, takes the view that the transcendental argument isn't a sort of self-standing argument, that it needs to be supplemented, as he says, by other kinds of theistic argument.

And he also suggests that the transcendental argument isn't actually a distinctive kind of argument. And so he's more open to other forms of theistic arguments, maybe more traditional cosmological design arguments.

And he's much more open to historical evidential arguments as well. Now, if those are two sort of significant poles in the world of Vantillian apologetics, I sort of locate myself somewhere between the two, in that I agree with Barneson that the transcendental argument really is a distinctive kind of argument, and it should be the centerpiece of our apologetic.

But with Frame, I don't think that that focus on a transcendental argument excludes other forms of theistic argument or the use of evidential arguments. So Barneson has this article on the impropriety of arguing evidentially for the resurrection.

So any kind of evidential argument for the resurrection is just a bad idea for Barneson.

Now, real quick, an argument from an evidential argument, does he mean, it seems to be that he would probably mean evidential in the sense that you're adopting that methodology. I mean, he wasn't against using evidence.

Well, if you read that article, I think that's right. I think that's really what he's saying, adopting an evidentialist approach. But what he says is, if I remember, that offering evidentially for the resurrection is a problem.

It's not as though in this article, after having critiqued a historical evidentialist approach, he says, now, here's the right way to argue, the right way to use evidentialists. It's as though he's dismissing any kind of evidential argument.

Now, I would certainly draw a distinction between evidentialism as an epistemology and evidential as an argument that incorporates evidences. I think you can argue evidentially without being an evidentialist in the stronger sense.

And probably that was Barneson's view. I mean, after all, on a lot of topics, he does argue evidentially. And when he talks about the positive historical basis for the resurrection, there's evidential appeals made there.

But there's sort of different versions of Barneson's polemic against traditional apologetics. And sometimes it's hard to see the more qualified version. Whereas in frame, it's very clear that what he's offering is a more moderate, qualified, broader scoped version of Vantillian presuppositionalism.

And I think a lot of people seem to be very open to frames approach because they do see the value in the use of these. I mean, surely you don't just argue in one way. And I mean, even Bonson would make various applications of a transcendental argument.

But a lot of people kind of see it as kind of this dichotomy. I'm either a presuppositionalist and I can't avail myself of these traditional arguments, or I'm an evidentialist or a classicalist and I can't avail, there's this kind of this back and forth.

I mean, obviously there's a distinctive, but there's distinctive between them. They're not the same thing. And there could be confusion in that regard. So I think it's good to see both sides of the coin with frame and Bonson there.

Yeah. And I think that the real dividing line between a presuppositional approach and a classical approach has to do with the overarching epistemology that you're adopting. Not necessarily specific arguments.

Actually some arguments, for example, Bonson used a moral argument or a version of the transcendental argument applied to morality. Now, if you didn't know anything about the methodological debate between Bonson and someone like Ossie Sproul or even someone like William Lane Craig, his moral argument sounds a lot like their moral argument.

And I think actually they're making the same sort of argument, namely that any kind of moral judgment presupposes moral norms and those moral norms need to be grounded in an absolute personal source or ground of morality.

So it's not so much the arguments as what is the broader epistemology that you're bringing to bear and within which these arguments are being offered. Very good. You answered sufficiently.

That was good. I didn't expect anything less from you. Somebody tells me he might know what he's talking about. It is good stuff. By the way, if you're not familiar with Dr. Anderson's blog, Analogical Thoughts, you need to get yourself down there and check the blog out.

He's got really good articles on transcendental arguments, even some Calvinism stuff on there, right? Determinism, compatibilism.

Yeah. If you go to the blog, it's got one of these tag clouds at the side. You know, a lot of WordPress and the tag cloud, the size of some of the terms will give you some insight in some of my obsessions and some of the topics that I write about.

Through some of your articles. And I think they're fantastic. And for those of you who are interested in the whole Calvinism stuff, you guys might want to check out my last two discussions with Guillaume Bignon, where we addressed a lot of the issues in that regard.

So definitely an interesting topic. Dr. Anderson has a lot of helpful stuff to bring to that conversation as well. Let's continue to move on with transcendental arguments. You said the transcendental arguments are the centerpiece of the presuppositional methodology.

Why don't you define for folks, and you did so before, but now that we're going to address this specifically here, why don't you define for us what transcendental arguments are, and then tell us what the transcendental argument is with regards to the presuppositional tradition?

What Transcendental Arguments Are and What TAG Claims

Right. So transcendental arguments per se are not apologetic arguments. And I'm sure many of your watchers, listeners are aware that transcendental arguments go at least back to, as far as Immanuel Kant, he certainly coined the term, but a transcendental argument in general is an argument that seeks to expose the preconditions of human knowledge or human rational experience.

So what it does is it takes for granted the possibility of rational thought and intelligible experience and asks, what must be the case? What are the ontological preconditions or the metaphysical preconditions, or to put it in simple terms, what must reality be like?

What must be ultimately the case in order for human knowledge and reason to be possible? That's what a transcendental argument in general seeks to do. And then, so what Van Til does is he takes this form of argument and says, this is the kind of argument that one has to make if one is going to defend a transcendental God.

That is, if you believe in a God who is personal, transcendent, absolute, the source of all things, the governor of all things, that all reality is ultimately dependent upon God and ordered by God, if you have that grand vision of God, then the only kind of argument that really would expose our absolute dependence on God would be a transcendental argument.

In other words, if you believe in the God of the Bible, then you ought to believe that everything, every thought, every rational thought from the most mundane to the most lofty can only be possible because that God exists, and creates us and is sustaining the universe.

And that's what a transcendental argument seeks to expose, not just our dependence on the physical reality, but ultimately on the divine reality, on God himself. So that's the basic idea that Van Til's getting when he offers this transcendental argument to the existence of God.

So why don't you explain for us, what is the transcendental argument for the Christian worldview being the necessary preconditions? Do you argue along that line? Do you make a variation and a tweak in the argument?

Are you arguing when you're using the transcendental argument an argument that demonstrates the existence of the concept of God, that there needs to be something necessary, or do you use it as a package deal that the Christian worldview and all of its essential features are true by the impossibility of the contrary?

How would you hash that out? What does the specific argument look like? Well, I think the first clarification.

That needs to be made, and I've made this in a few places, is I don't think there is such a thing as the transcendental argument any more than there is the moral argument or the cosmological argument.

Rather, what we're talking about is a sort of a family of arguments or maybe an argument strategy. So to take the example of cosmological arguments, the cosmological argument is usually defined as a first cause argument, but actually there are different versions.

You get different versions of the cosmological argument. Likewise, the transcendental argument, which seeks to show that the existence of God is a necessary precondition of human knowledge, there are different ways that you can reach that conclusion.

And so I've defended in a few places different forms of argument in one publication, which I coauthored with Greg Welty. I defend an argument from logic. I argue that the laws of logic presuppose the existence of God.

In another couple of other articles, I've argued that rationality, rationality is a kind of a cognitive norm. It requires a normative standard for thought. And if there are rational norms, then there needs to be an ultimate standard of rationality, and that would only come from the mind of God.

I've used versions of the moral argument, that moral judgments presuppose absolute moral norms, which have to be grounded in an absolute person. Arguments from science. So scientific knowledge presupposes the uniformity of nature.

It presupposes the reliability of our cognitive faculties, our perceptual faculties. There are various presuppositions that the scientific method depends on, that I think need to be accounted for in a biblical theistic worldview.

But whether a transcendental argument, or how much of the Christian worldview can be proven with a transcendental argument is not only a matter of debate over Van Til's position on this, but also a matter of debate over what in fact one can accomplish with a transcendental argument.

I think a transcendental argument can certainly demonstrate the existence of a personal, absolute, transcendent God. I'm optimistic that one can use a transcendental argument to show that this God must be multi-personal.

But that's a bit of a more challenging argument. Whether you could... Yeah, I apologize.

Well, if people are interested in what that might look like, in the previous show, we did have Brent Bosserman on to talk about why God is three in terms of his persons, and how that is connected to the transcendental argument and epistemological questions of predication and oneness and manyness.

So you wanna perhaps give that one a listen, and then come back and listen to this one and see how that might make an important connection. Because it is something, what you just mentioned there, I think when we say that the Christian God provides the preconditions for intelligibility, and we get into that whole oneness and manyness, that's an extra step that you need to kind of dive in a little more that I think a lot of presuppositionalists don't have developed as much, or they're not used to talking about.

So I think there is, getting back to what you said at the beginning, we need to be careful as presuppositionalists to be okay merely with presuppositional platitudes and sayings. You need to dive into some of these nitty gritty things.

And so we don't wanna make the argument say more than it's actually saying, but we don't want to also minimize. I mean, we wanna also present the strength of the argument as well. You were gonna say something, I cut in there.

No, I'm glad that you did. And I'm actually glad that you had Brandt on your show. And I would encourage people, I'm gonna check that out myself. He's certainly got some very interesting and quite, he's moved the argument along in a way that no one has done.

And I have some, certainly some questions about the way he articulates it, but that's a sort of intramural debate. But definitely that would be worth people checking out to see how that argument can be developed.

But the other point that you made about presuppositionalists who perhaps overstate the argument or over promise what can be accomplished with a transcendental argument. I've always been one that I've tried not to say, promise more for the argument that I personally can defend.

If other people think that they can defend more than have at it. But I have been somewhat critical of presuppositionalists who I think have made grand claims and then haven't delivered on those claims with actual argument.

So what that does mean is I think that there's more work to be done by presuppositionalists. I think there's some really exciting work being done. I think we're seeing more and more young presuppositionalists who are getting very well-trained philosophically and wanting to break new ground in terms of making these presuppositional arguments.

So I think it's an exciting time, but also we have to recognize that there's still work to be done.

Whether TAG Can Be Formalized as a Deductive Argument

Now, would you, well, you know, I was gonna ask a question, I'll save it for later because then that might throw us a little off here. Okay, so there's a criticism and it was a criticism thrown at Van Til and other presuppositionalists about, well, where is the actual argument when we're talking about the transcendental argument?

You know, give me the premises. Let me see if the conclusion follows. Is there a way that one can use, say, a transcendental argument in a deductive fashion, maybe a deductive argument in which one of the premises are defended transcendentally?

How might that look like? Yeah, yeah, one of the frustrating things about Van Til's own writings is that he talks quite clearly about this transcendental argument and the need for a transcendental argument and he sketches out different ways of approaching the question, but you never find any formalized version of the argument.

Whereas you go to someone like Alvin Plantinga and Alvin Plantinga's works are, you know, literally full of numbered premises and, you know, inferential steps. So there's a number of reasons for that difference and partly it's because Van Til is operating within a, generally speaking, a different philosophical tradition.

It's a more continental idealist tradition. Whereas this need to have explicitly stated, formalized, deductive arguments is more a product of the Anglo-American analytic tradition. And so you get someone like Banson, for example.

So Banson actually received his philosophical training in the analytic tradition. And so you find more of an analytic exposition of the transcendental argument in Banson's work and in others, but you don't find it in Van Til.

And so you have to go digging for it and it requires quite a bit of interpretation. And even then it's frustratingly vague at the very points where you would want him to be precise. For example, this one many argument.

And Van Til tends to argue by illustration. So he'll take Hume's epistemology, he'll take Kant, he'll take Plato, you know, and he gives a critique of each, which he takes to be illustrations of the critique of non-Christian thought.

Now that's very helpful in itself, but what many of us would like is, well, what's the general argument here? What's the abstract argument, you know, abstracted from all these historical illustrations?

What is the argument itself so that we can see it without it being tied to these particular illustrations? Now, in one of my articles I wrote a number of years ago on the epistemological theistic arguments of Van Til and Plantinga, where I was bringing out some common themes, trying to demonstrate there's some common themes actually in Van Til and Plantinga and the way they argue for the existence of God.

I tried to formalize a little more some of Van Til's arguments and anyone who's interested can go and pull that article off my website and they can see some examples of that, but you don't get that kind of formalization.

So where do you go to find it? Well, the article that I wrote on the argument for God from logic sets it out, you know, a transcendental argument or a kind of transcendental argument in a more formal way.

Now I should say that, and I'm sure you're aware of this, that there is actually a debate among Van Tilians over whether it is possible in principle to formalize the transcendental argument. Some say, well, the transcendental argument isn't a deductive argument.

It certainly isn't an inductive argument, that would be probabilistic, but they'll say that it's not even a deductive argument, there's something special about a transcendental argument. I think that that's based on a confusion about some things that Van Til makes, some comments that Van Til makes about deductive and inductive arguments.

I think if a deductive argument, and this is the technical definition of a deductive argument, a deductive argument is an argument where the conclusion follows necessarily from the premises. The conclusion is entailed by the premises.

Then I would say a transcendental argument has to be a deductive argument because a transcendental argument is supposed to have a certain conclusion. It's not a probabilistic argument if it's not a probabilistic argument.

Assuming it's an argument at all, and honestly, I get the impression that some presuppositionists aren't entirely sure whether a transcendental argument really is an argument. I'm quite happy to say, yes, it's an argument, that's why it's called a transcendental argument.

So it must have premises. If it really is an argument and if it can really be articulated, it must have premises, it must have a conclusion, it must have inferences from the premises to the conclusions.

So I don't see in principle any reason why a transcendental argument cannot be formalized as a deductive argument, but that doesn't mean it's just any, it's an ordinary deductive argument or there's nothing special about it.

I think what's special about a transcendental argument is not the logical form that it takes, but rather the nature of the premises. So what it's taking is its starting point, namely the possibility of rational thought.

And also there's a modal dimension to a transcendental argument. It's not just an argument about actual human thought, but it's about the very possibility of rational thought. So there's a modal character to a transcendental argument that I think makes it distinctive as well.

Now, I heard this argument, I don't know if it was from you or someone else, but someone said, if knowledge is possible, then God exists. Knowledge is possible, therefore God exists. Do you take that as a valid argument?

And if so, I have another question.

Well, I've certainly said something very similar to that. And I would endorse that argument. I mean, if you state it that way, if knowledge is possible, then God exists. Knowledge is possible, therefore God exists.

That's a deductive argument right there. I mean, it's a modus prudens argument. There's also this debate about direct and indirect arguments that I think, I'm not sure how useful really that debate is.

But sure, the argument that you just summarized there, if knowledge is possible, then God exists, which is logically equivalent saying, if there is no God, then knowledge is impossible. It's just restating that premise in a negative form.

And then if knowledge is possible, then it follows that God exists. That's a simple summary of the transcendental argument or a way of stating the transcendental argument. But the issue is how do you defend that conditional premise?

How do you defend the claim that if knowledge is possible, then God exists? And in order to do that, you need to have an analysis of what knowledge is. You need to talk about what is knowledge and what would be some of the preconditions of knowledge.

A precondition is just a condition of possibility. So if knowledge is, the preconditions of knowledge would simply be what needs to be in place? What needs to be the case in order for knowledge to be possible even in principle for us?

Knowledge, Evidence, and the Preconditions of Rationality

So would you say, okay, so if knowledge is possible, God exists, knowledge is possible, therefore God exists. Would you say that one would have to defend the first premise transcendentally along with those side conversations of defining what knowledge is, exploring what the preconditions are, and then show the necessary connection of the existence of God and the possibility of knowledge?

Well, that's the meat of the argument, defending that connection between the existence of God and the possibility of knowledge. You can't just assume that premise because any critic, any atheist, or any critic of the argument at all is gonna say, well, why should I accept that premise in the first place?

Why should I accept that the possibility of knowledge entails or implies the existence of God? Give me some reasons to accept that claim. And there are a number of ways that you can approach that. One is by talking about the nature of truth.

Another would have to do with, I think the reliability of our cognitive faculties, that we have cognitive faculties that are well-aimed towards the acquisition of true beliefs. In fact, Plantinga's offered an argument along these lines that I think is actually a transcendental argument.

It's a kind of transcendental argument, although he doesn't call it that. The idea of laws of logic or rules of inference. There are all kinds of preconditions that knowledge has that I think we could explore and we could argue depend at some level on the existence of God and not just any God, but a personal absolute God.

Okay.

Now, okay, I'm trying to think just off the top of my head. So if knowledge is possible, God exists. Knowledge is possible, therefore God exists. Couldn't you place any concept in that first premise? So for example, if someone wanted to talk about evidence, is there evidence for the God of the Bible?

Couldn't you argue, if the concept of evidence is coherent, God exists. The concept of evidence is coherent, therefore God exists. Could you? Okay, so you can basically tweak it in different ways. Since God is, we're arguing that he is the transcendental precondition for coherency in general.

Yeah. Well, of course you could swap in anything there. You could swap rabbits in. You could say if rabbits are possible, then God exists. But the thing is, you know, that'd be an interesting argument.

New theistic argument, the argument from rabbits. Okay. Or the possibility of rabbits. But the point is that's not a transcendental argument because it has nothing to do with knowledge or our cognitive capacities.

So what we're arguing as transcendental argument, and specifically a theistic transcendental argument, is that the existence of God is a precondition of human cognition or human rationality or human knowledge.