The Transcendental Argument

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 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 reform 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?

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 Reform 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, 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.

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?

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.

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 Vantilian or I'm a Framian or I'm a Bonsonian, which a lot of people would say, well, that's pretty much being a

Vantilian. And they're 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? Okay, so the moment you step into that, you're committing yourself to a particular interpretation of Vantill.

So, you know, 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 other than 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 doesn't 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 historical evidentialist approach, he says, now, here's the right way to argue, the right way to use evidentialist.

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 Banson'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 Banson'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.

Sure, and I think a lot of people seem to be very open to Frame's approach because they do see the value in the use of these.

I mean, surely you don't just argue in one way. And even Banson would make various applications of a transcendental argument.

But a lot of people kind of see it as kind of this dichotomy. I mean, they're presuppositionalists 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 Banson 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, Banson 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 Banson 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 wanna 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 gonna 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?

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 Vantil's getting at 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 co -authored 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 Brant 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 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 overpromise 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 than 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.

Now, would you... Well, 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?

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, 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 literally full of numbered premises and 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, 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, 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 was some common themes actually in Van Til and Plantinga and the way they argued 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 in 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 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 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 podens 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.

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 take it in different ways since 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.

There are different dimensions of human rational faculties that you could focus on.

Wouldn't that be connected though? If you're talking about the concept of evidence, it's a concept. So concepts that are coherent presuppose logic and rationality.

So couldn't you kind of get there anyway by exploring the concept itself and then looking for the preconditions for the coherency of that concept?

Well, I suppose you could argue that in order for us to have concepts, in order for us to reason about concepts at all, including the concept of evidence, then sure, that would be a way to go.

Another way to approach it would be evidence, of course, is concerned with truth. So evidence in the most general sense is anything that indicates truth.

So if I have evidence for some claim, then I have something that indicates the truth of that claim. And it may be strong evidence, it may be weak evidence, but evidence presupposes the idea of truth.

And I think the idea of truth, that there are truths, is very fertile ground for transcendental argumentation.

And actually this is closely related to the argument from the laws of logic. Because the argument that I make from the laws of logic is actually a particular case of the argument from truth.

That if there are truths or true propositions, then there has to be, basically these are ultimately divine thoughts.

It's an argument for the existence of God as the grounding of true propositions.

And so if you start talking about evidence, then evidence presupposes the existence of truth.

So that would be one way to get to the same conclusion. Okay, very good. All right, now

I guess my next question would be the concept of God.

When we use the argument, for example, let's use it because we're on it. If knowledge is possible, God exists.

Now, obviously God has to have content, otherwise it's a meaningless word. So if you were to use that argument, if knowledge is possible,

God exists, are you specifically trying, are you going to try and argue that the

God in that premise is the biblical God, along with all the trappings that biblical revelation gives to him, his oneness and multiplicity and all these other attributes?

So, because we have to be very careful when we say if knowledge is possible, God exists.

It's like, well, is this just a generic argument for a theistic God or does this concept have content that specifically pertains to the

Christian God? How would you have that? Well, I think some presuppositionalists have tripped themselves up a little bit here by insisting that the transcendental argument has to prove the existence of the

God of the Bible. Now, of course, I don't want any argument that proves a

God other than the God of the Bible. In other words, it proves something that's inconsistent with what the

Bible says about God. Does that mean that the argument has to include in its conclusion every attribute of God that scripture gives us or every characteristic of God?

Does it have to prove that God is both one and many, that God is multi -personal?

If so, does it have to further prove that God is tri -personal?

Okay, if it has to prove that, does it also have to prove that these three persons are

Father, Son and Holy Spirit? Does it have to prove that the first person is the begetter of the second person and the first and second persons of God are, you know, the third person proceeds?

How specific are you going to get about what you're defining as the

God of the Bible? And does that turn into historical claims as well? Does it have to show that this

God revealed himself to Abraham or that he revealed himself to Moses or that he became incarnate in Jesus Christ?

You see the problem, there has to be some line. There has to be some point at which you say, okay, there are certain claims that the

Bible makes about God that are true, that are taught in scripture, but that don't have to be part of the conclusion of our transcendental argument or our presuppositional argument.

Would it, okay, I'm thinking in terms of if we're arguing the Christian worldview as a package deal, wouldn't that incorporate it just in light of the nature of the package that if this is the

God that we're proving, then everything else that he's revealed, which is included in that, it's kind of necessarily connected, it seems.

Well, in principle, yes, you want to prove the Christian worldview as a package deal.

I don't know if, I don't think Vantill ever used specifically that term. I know Barnson often spoke about the

Christian worldview. And I'm completely on board with that in the sense that I, and I've made this argument in a number of places, that we do not want to separate the

God of the Bible from the Bible of the God of the Bible. In other words, when we argue to put on a mock or something,

I like that. Can you say that? Yeah, as long as I get the proceeds from any merchandise that you sell with that on it.

But the point is that the Christian worldview isn't just about the existence of God. It's about the existence of God who has revealed himself specifically in scripture and in the person of Jesus Christ.

And there are other elements to this worldview. So when I'm arguing for Christianity, I'm not just arguing for the existence of God.

I'm also arguing for, sometimes I use the line from Francis Schaeffer. So God is there and God is not silent.

I mean, these are two clear claims. It's not just that God is not there, that God is there, but that God speaks.

This is a God who speaks and speaks specifically through scripture.

And of course that traces back to prophetic history and the words of Christ in particular and so forth.

But the revelational claim is part of the package. And I think there are other parts of the package.

And I would say certainly the triune nature of God is part of that package as well. But again, there's a boundary question.

What claims are included in the package and what are not? So for example, if scripture says that Solomon had so many wives and concubines, which it does, is that part of the package?

Is that part of the Christian worldview? When I'm defending the Christian worldview, do I have to offer some sort of argument that the number of wives

Solomon had is actually a precondition of human knowledge? I'm pretty sure I don't have to do that, but rather there are certain core claims that establish the distinctives of a

Christian worldview. One of those core claims is the inspiration of the Bible as God's word.

And then once you have the Bible as God's word, of course, all of the specific historical claims of scripture follow from that.

But at some level, you have to argue more generically for the

Bible as God's word rather than defending all the specific claims. Yeah, I think

I'm tracking with you. I'm trying to think though that when we're talking about the amount of concubines and wives that Solomon had, it seems to be an essential feature of the

Christian worldview since it's part of the Bible, which is our source of information. So you see what

I'm saying? So if we're defending the God of the Bible, it would seem to include, what's included in the package, it seems to me, would be his revelation of which how many wives

Solomon had is part of, right? Well, I think maybe there's an ambiguity here in that certainly everything that scripture teaches is part of the divine revelation.

But I don't think everything that scripture teaches is as it were definitive of the

Christian faith. Otherwise, for example, suppose just for the sake of argument that you're an amillennialist and I'm a postmillennialist or that you're a credobaptist and I'm a pedobaptist.

If we make those essential claims of the Christian faith, one of us is denying an essential claim of the

Christian faith. But that's not generally how we view things. We view certain essential claims of the

Christian worldview. Then we have a certain prioritization of claims.

And let's face it, there are some claims in scripture that where there are textual variants that we know about, and we don't have a certain answer to specifically whether one textual variant is right or another.

So I take that to be at the sort of the penumbra of what we mean by Christian revelation or Christian teaching.

All right, this question sounds really, I'm trying to think in terms of how can this question not sound random?

I mean, you might get the gist of what I'm saying. Just to get a, because I know there are people who understand the transcendental argument and the necessity of God.

Would you say that it is impossible for you to be incorrect that the

Christian worldview is true? Right, you understand the angle

I'm trying to get? This is the, could you be wrong? Not to throw into the issue of like skepticism or anything like that.

It's more, I usually bring this out when I'm trying to see how firm the person holds the truth of the

Christian worldview as being that necessary precondition. So for example, someone says, well, I could be wrong.

Then I'll say, well, that's interesting that if you're holding that God is the necessary precondition, but then you said it's possible that you could be wrong.

It almost seems like more foundational to your worldview than God is actually this contingency, this kind of possibility in which can, in a sense, may falsify your commitment to the

Christian God. So that's why I asked the question because it gives me a gauge as to where the person stands and how firm this perspective they're holding onto it or do they have wiggle space and have a different understanding as to how that works out?

So I hope you understand where I'm coming from. I think I do. Let me give you my take on it and then you can tell me whether I completely missed the boat or not.

So my conviction that God is the precondition of human knowledge and in fact, the precondition of everything, every element of human experience.

For me, that's a theologically grounded conviction rather than a philosophically one.

In other words, the reason I hold it is not on the basis of a transcendental argument, but actually on the basis of the fact that I'm a

Christian and that I accept the testimony of scripture about God. And I think that there's a confusion among some presuppositionalists or maybe not in the presuppositionalists themselves, but I think it's perpetuated by some of the claims that presuppositionalists have made that our knowledge of God comes from the transcendental argument, that our conviction about the existence and attributes of God comes from the transcendental argument itself.

I don't think that's the case. I think the transcendental argument is a way of vindicating our prior conviction that God exists, which comes from,

I would suggest with Calvin, the natural knowledge of God that comes through natural revelation.

I think my starting point is that everyone knows

God through natural revelation, although sinners suppress that in unrighteousness.

But because I'm a Christian, because I believe in God on the basis of both natural revelation and special revelation,

I have a certain understanding of who God is or the nature of God and how the creation, including me and my knowledge and my rational capacities, how they depend upon God.

So my understanding that everything depends on God actually comes out of my prior

Christian theology. And what the transcendental argument does is that that's a more philosophical way of vindicating those theological foundations.

What that means is, even if I didn't have a transcendental argument, nevermind if I had one and it turned out to be a dud, even if I didn't have a transcendental argument,

I'm still warranted in believing that human knowledge and human rationality depends on God because I have an independent knowledge of God through revelation, all right?

So I think it's important to get that distinction straight, that how we know that God exists is different from how we show or demonstrate or vindicate that knowledge of God by way of a presuppositional argument.

So if someone says to me, could I be wrong about the transcendental argument? I'm quite comfortable saying, yeah,

I could be wrong. Of course, that doesn't mean a whole lot unless someone actually gives me a reason to think

I'm wrong and says, look, here's a flaw in your argument. Okay, now we've got something to talk about. But simply someone just asking in the abstract, could your formulation, could your argument from logic, could it have a flaw in it?

Sure. I mean, I'm fallible. Maybe I did make a mistake in the argument, but unless someone's gonna point it out, we don't have much further to talk about.

But even if I had no argument, I think I'm still warranted in believing that there is an argument.

In principle, there is an argument that would demonstrate the absolute necessity of God as the foundation of all human thought and reason.

Hmm, well, I did have a question, a question I wanted to ask on the spot, and I forgot it.

But just know, folks, that it was a really good question. And my argument, my answer to your question would have been fantastic.

I know, it probably would have. Okay, okay, no, I think I remember it. Okay, so you said you could be wrong about the transcendental argument.

Now that could be taken in a couple of ways. You could mean that I could be wrong in the formulation of a particular transcendental argument, or you could be wrong about transcendental argumentation in general.

Now, I don't know if that's what you meant, but I was thinking right away now, do you think that the

Bible, as God's revelation, provides for us kind of the ingredients to arguing this way?

Such that if you were to admit that you could be wrong about transcendental arguments in general as a way of demonstrating

God, that that actually would affect your conviction that the Bible actually teaches that this is precisely the way we should be talking about God, namely as in his light, we see light and all the verses usually use in relation to that.

Does that make sense? Yeah, I think so. So I would say that what scripture does is it gives us the raw materials for a transcendental argument, because it tells us things about the nature of God, about the nature of creation.

In a sense, the Bible tees up a transcendental argument.

So it says, this is the kind of God who has revealed himself.

And that means that everything depends on God, including your ability to think at all.

So in him, we live and move and have our being, or from him and through him and to him are all things.

I mean, these are sweeping statements about the absolute dependence of all of creation on God.

But then of course, you have scriptures like in thy light, we see light or the fear of the

Lord is the beginning of knowledge. These are not statements of a transcendental argument, but they are mandates for a transcendental argument,

I think. All right, all right, thank you for that. Okay, so now I'm gonna go into the portion of our discussion here to see if you could address some common objections to presuppositionalism in general.

And then we'll take some questions from the live chat, and then we'll wrap things up, as I am already appreciative of the fact that you have given me at least 58 minutes of your time.

We'll try to squeeze a little bit more juice out of this lemon, but let's see. I'm not sure that's the metaphor you wanna use, but.

Oh my goodness, all right. So let's deal with some common objections. So what would you say to someone that says that presuppositionalism is basically circular, and that it basically reduces to postmodernism?

Every worldview starts with a circle, and so you can't escape that circularity, and so it's really just your worldview versus the other person's worldview, and there's really no way to get out of that.

How would you respond to someone who says something like that? I'm gonna say, yes, there is a circularity in the argument, but it's not a fallacious circularity.

I think once someone grasps the nature of a transcendental argument, what a transcendental argument seeks to do is to expose the preconditions of rational thought.

Now, of course, if you're gonna argue in the first place, you're assuming that there is rational thought.

So there's a sense in which a transcendental argument assumes the very things that it's seeking to expose.

It assumes the preconditions of rational argument, and it has to, but the point is that even the critic has to as well.

So this is one of the things where we're asking, what are the foundations of the house of human knowledge, to use that Vantillian metaphor?

We want to ask, what are the foundations of the house of human knowledge? Well, of course, we're standing in that house the whole time and you can't avoid that.

So there is, you're depending on the foundations while you're arguing for the foundations.

There's nothing fallacious about that. Sometimes critics of presuppositionalism caricature the argument as though we're arguing,

God exists, therefore God exists, or the Bible is God's word and it says it's

God's word, therefore it is God's word. These are caricatures. And if someone says that that's the sort of circularity that presuppositionalism engages in, then at that point,

I'm starting to think then they're not a serious person. They haven't really taken the time to look into this.

So the distinction really here is that the circularity of a transcendental argument comes not from the premises, but from the presuppositions.

That is to say, when we're arguing for the existence of God transcendent, transcendentally, we are presupposing the existence of God, but we're not taking the existence of God as a premise.

There's a difference between a presupposition of an argument and the premise of the argument. And if you think, if you go back to the summary of the transcendental argument you gave earlier, so if knowledge is possible, then

God exists. Knowledge is possible, therefore God exists. There's nothing fallaciously circular about that argument at all.

But if the argument is sound, then of course we've been presupposing God the whole time because we've been assuming knowledge is possible.

But that's just the nature of a transcendental argument. There's gonna be a presuppositional circularity there.

And in that argument, if knowledge is possible, God exists. Knowledge is possible, therefore God exists.

We're presupposing God the entire time, but the argument is just merely to show the person that look, we needed

God before we even argued. Okay, to just show the person. Yeah, it's as though, the way

I sometimes put it is in an apologetic encounter, there has to be common ground, right?

There has to be certain things that you and the other person agree upon in order to get started.

So we can assume that there's some common ground and we've got maybe an unbeliever and a believer, a

Christian and a non -Christian debating. And what we're asking is who owns that common ground or what makes that common ground possible?

There's this misconception that presuppositions don't believe in common ground. That's not the case. It's not that we deny common ground.

It's that we deny that the common ground is neutral ground, that it's philosophically or religiously neutral common ground.

What we are arguing as presuppositionalists is, see this common ground that we've been standing on the whole time?

That's Christian ground. And you may not have acknowledged it, but that's where it comes from.

It's grounded in the existence of the God of the Bible. And we're depending on it.

We're standing on it the whole time. All the argument seeks to do is to expose what has been going on the whole time, to expose the foundations of the house or whatever metaphor you wanna use for that foundation that we're treating as common ground.

Hmm. One last question, and then we'll move on to the folks who are listening in. Well, what's up with this common objection that I often hear that presuppositionalists confuse ontology with epistemology?

I'm sure you're familiar with this. That on the one hand, we'll say God is the necessary precondition for intelligibility.

And then we'll kind of go back and forth to belief in God is the necessary precondition.

And people point out, well, there seems to be a confusion or a conflation between ontology and epistemology.

Have you heard this before? I have, I have. I've heard it from certain Thomist critics of Van Til.

And I'm not entirely clear on what the criticism is, to be honest. If the criticism is that we're not clear on whether it's the existence of God or belief in the existence of God that's the precondition,

I'm quite willing to be clear about that. And I will say, no, it is the existence of God. I don't think you need to argue that belief in God is a presupposition of human knowledge.

Well, maybe you can make that argument, but I don't think that that's fundamentally what Van Til was getting at. When he talks about the ontological trinity as being the foundation of knowledge or the necessity of the ontological trinity, he's not saying that people need to believe in the doctrine of the trinity in order to know anything.

What he's saying is that there has to be, as a matter of ontological fact, a triune

God in order for us to have intelligible knowledge of the universe. So it is an ontological claim, but it's an ontological claim underlying, undergirding an epistemological claim.

So the transcendental argument is an epistemological argument because it's arguing from certain epistemological assumptions, namely that knowledge is possible or that rational argument is possible or however you want to frame the argument.

But it's arguing for ontological preconditions of epistemological claims or epistemological...

Well, it's not so much epistemological as epistemic. We would say epistemic operations. So things, our ability to know, to have orderly experiences, to reason, these are what we call epistemic operations that we have.

And we're asking, what are the ontological preconditions? What must exist? How must reality be ultimately in order for these things to be possible?

So I don't think, I think once you understand the nature of a transcendental argument, you recognize that there's an epistemology there and there's an ontology there as well.

And I don't think the two are being confused. Okay. All right, well, let's move along quickly because I, again,

I do apologize. I don't want to take too much of your time. If you don't mind,

I'd love to run through some questions here. I usually run my guests through the gauntlet right before I let them go.

And this is kind of the part of the show that people really like to listen to because a lot of these questions may or may not be directly related to what we're talking about.

If you don't know it, just, you can wave your hand or move on. If the signal suddenly cuts out and the screen goes blank, you'll know that a question came up that I didn't know how to answer.

Imagine you just like ran away. You were like, I can't answer. You just ran off. That'd be pretty interesting. I'm very, very happy to admit when

I don't know the answer to a question. Okay, well, good. That's very helpful. All right, so here's a question. Do you think

Eastern Orthodox like the, do you think the Eastern Orthodox like the transcendental argument a lot?

I've heard it's actually Jay Dyer using it a lot. I don't know if you're familiar with Jay Dyer, but he is an

Orthodox Christian and he is known on the internet for using transcendental arguments.

So can someone from an Orthodox tradition use it in a consistent way or do you think this is specifically the property of reformed

Christians? What do you think? Okay, so this might be a good example of a question to which I don't know the answer and I'm not sure

I should try and bluff my way through it. I'm not familiar with, is it Jay Dyer?

Jay Dyer, yeah. Okay, so I apologize to him for not being familiar with his material and if he's

Eastern Orthodox then obviously we've got our theological differences. I will say this in general terms that I think there's a reason why presuppositionalism has grown out of reformed theology because presuppositionalism is grounded in certain convictions about the sovereignty of God, the aseity of God, that is the self -existence of God and the absolute independence of God.

And I think certain convictions about divine revelation and the self -attesting nature of scripture.

So there's a theological package out of which presuppositionalism has been developed.

And I don't think that you can just transplant it into another theological context and expect everything to be fine.

As though you can dig a tree out of one particular kind of soil and just transplant it and expect it to grow in a quite different kind of soil.

And I do not profess to be an expert in Eastern Orthodox theology, but I do know that Eastern Orthodox folk do take issue with sort of Augustinian understanding of divine sovereignty and human freedom.

What's that? They're usually not big fans of Augustine. Right, not fans of Augustine.

And so there are some significant theological and philosophical differences.

And one, I think it has to do with the nature of free will. Again, Eastern Orthodox have their own sort of set of terminology and it's not always easy to interpret

Eastern Orthodox claims with the vocabulary of Western theology and of analytic philosophy as well.

But I think that there's more of a commitment to what we would call libertarian free will.

And that puts certain things beyond the control of God. God would not then be what

Van Til calls the all conditioner, the one who is sovereignly directing all things according to the counsel of his will.

But I think that that actually is a presupposition of human knowledge. I think unless there is one divine mind that is sovereignly ordering all things according to his rationality and his purposes, then you have elements of ultimately chaos, ultimately randomness, inexplicable events in the universe.

And I think that that's epistemologically problematic. So that's just a general observation that I think that there is a deep connection between reformed theology and presuppositional epistemology.

But it requires quite a bit of unpacking. Sure, sure, sure. And we're gonna be focusing more on that in when we have

Emilio Ramos on, we'll talk a little bit about the relationship there. Thank you very much. Here's a question. Was Jesus a presuppositionalist?

Of course. Was he a Calvinist and a Peter Baptist? And I mean, on one level, it's a reasonable question.

Sure. Jesus, of course, believed everything that is true, at least as to his divine nature.

So if presuppositionalism is the right apologetic methodology, then Jesus in his divinity, of course, knew that.

So then in a sense, that's a trivial question. You could ask, was Jesus a believer in general relativity or something like that?

It's as an entailment of his omniscience. Well, yes, of course. Again, assuming that general relativity is a true theory.

You having Jason Lyle on? I'm in the works. I'm talking with his - You can get him to answer that question.

I see your expertise as I understand it. But the more serious question is, does

Jesus himself teach a presuppositional methodology?

No. Part of Christ's mission was not to specifically lay down how we're going to do apologetics.

You have to look at the whole counsel of scripture for a number of theological and philosophical issues.

And since, of course, Christ is the ultimate author of all the scripture, the scripture is the word of Christ, then we can take scripture as being the testimony of Jesus himself.

So if presuppositionalism as a methodology maybe isn't taught explicitly in scripture, but if there are certain theological and epistemological principles in scripture from which presuppositionalism follows, then yes, indirectly,

Jesus is teaching us to be presuppositionalists. But in a sense, it reduces to the question of, does the

Bible teach presuppositionalism? And that's probably a more natural way to frame the question.

All right, thank you for that. Nathan says, Eli, you always have collared shirts. You got a problem with that? I like collared shirts.

No, we'll get rid of that. Yeah, I can't dispute it. I can't dispute it. When I'm relaxing at home,

I do wear other clothes, but for whatever reason, yeah. Well, for all we know, you might be in your pajamas.

I mean, everything's on the computer now, so all you need is - I'm fully clothed right now. I can tell you that.

All right, here's a question. How would you characterize recent Westminster Seminary Vantillians, folks like Tipton and Olyphant?

How would you categorize them, I guess, with regards to their closeness to Vanscott or differences there?

In a sense, I'm reluctant to answer that because I think people should be allowed to speak for themselves.

So rather than have me characterize what Scott Olyphant says, go read

Scott's books, okay? I mean, he's laid out his views in Covenantal Apologetics and various other books.

So, you know, no more than I would want someone to go to Scott and say, characterize

Anderson's presuppositionalism, you know? There's something a little artificial about that.

I do think that probably there's a certain emphasis among our friends at Westminster that places more of an emphasis on biblical theology in the sense of, you know,

Gerhard is Voss and that approach. They want to ground presuppositionalism more in the categories of biblical theology.

And so that's partly why the terminology of Covenantal Apologetics has been adopted. I've got no beef with that.

I don't argue with that. I think it's more a matter of emphasis than anything else.

Generally, they want to emphasis more the biblical theological foundations of presuppositionalism.

I'm partly because that's not my area of expertise. I'm trained in philosophical theology.

So I tend to approach it from that. And it's different perspectives on one methodology.

And of course, presuppositionalists often vary in the kind of arguments that they offer in practice.

So, you know, we talked earlier about Banson and Banson's got his sort of triad of arguments that he would use in debates from logic, science, and morality.

And, you know, that was just partly his style, partly a consequence of his particular philosophical training.

And so you're gonna find variations among presuppositionalists in practice, the sort of arguments that they focus on, the vocabulary they use, the points they emphasize.

But that doesn't mean that there's some deep division, that there's some sort of, you know, big partisan debate within the

Bantill camp. Of course, I think there are some substantive disagreements maybe about the details of the transcendental argument and so forth.

But I think that the differences are often overstated. Sure, I agree.

And I think part of the thing that I wanted to do with this channel is to show, as I mentioned before we started, the broad application of it.

And some people might be really good at applying a transcendental argument in a specific way, using specific vocabulary, and others might be good at doing it in a different way.

So I think we should consider all of the different varieties with which we can use this methodology.

And people are gonna play to their strengths. Of course they are. Yeah, yeah. So that's partly what accounts for the differences.

You know, you could line up six people who claim to be presuppositionalists and say, well, he uses this kind of argument, he uses that kind of argument.

Well, it may be just that they're applying the presuppositional method to their particular area of expertise.

Sure, and not everyone's a Bonson who placed great emphasis on the epistemological issues. I mean, you might have a different bent with regards to how that all works out.

Here is Pine Creek. He is our, I guess, I can't call him local because I don't know where he lives, but he is an atheist, agnostic, skeptic sort of guy.

And so he's made a comment here. If you need God to justify morality, then you can't use the observation of morality to justify

God without being circular. How would you speak to that? Or would you agree with it, or? No, I don't.

It looks like a non -sequitur to me. If you need God to justify morality, well, that's ambiguous in itself, okay?

Does someone need to believe in God in order to have moral knowledge?

No, I don't think so, even though I think everyone has a suppressed knowledge of God. I don't think that your knowledge of moral truths is inferred as such from your knowledge of God.

So I think moral beliefs are what epistemologists call properly basic beliefs, okay?

So I think they're known by intuition. But then the deeper question is, why are there moral truths?

And how do we have moral knowledge? I don't need to claim that an atheist needs to believe in God to know the difference, to know that murder is wrong, or that stealing is wrong, or that lying is wrong.

I think that we have a properly basic belief in certain fundamental moral norms or standards.

But what the presuppositionalist is arguing is, how do you account for those moral truths and our knowledge of those moral truths?

There's actually different kinds of moral argument. One kind of moral argument is an argument from moral realism itself.

So why are there objective moral truths? Another argument is more epistemological.

It has to do with how do we know moral truths? Because even if there are moral truths, there's still a question of how do we have access to them?

How would we know them? And that's where a presuppositionalist is going to argue that a theistic worldview, and not just any theistic worldview,

I think a certain conception of God is important here, is necessary in order for us to account for the existence of moral truths in the first place, and moral facts, and moral norms, and for our knowledge of those norms.

So basically, I don't accept the premise of the objection here.

I don't think that there's a kind of circularity. It's not as though you're arguing from morality to God, and then arguing from God to morality in some sort of circle.

You're not. You're starting with the assumption that we have moral knowledge. That's the premise of the argument, that we know that there are certain moral truths, and then you're arguing from that to the existence of God as a presupposition or as an ontological precondition of those moral truths.

But it's to go back to that common ground illustration that I talked about earlier. This common ground,

I think, with most people on certain moral truths. Of course, you get the moral skeptics. You get the moral nihilists who wanna bite the bullet and say, no, nothing's right or wrong.

There is no moral knowledge. It's all an illusion, and you have to deal with that situation in a somewhat different way.

But for those who are willing to grant that there are at least some objective moral truths, that's the common ground we're standing on, and again, we're asking, so how do we make sense of that common ground?

Which worldview can account for that common ground? There's nothing fallaciously circular about that at all.

He goes on to say, if you need a transcendental God to justify transcendental logic, then you can't use transcendental logic to justify a transcendental

God without being circular. Again, I don't even understand what this conditional means in the first place.

If you need a transcendental God to justify transcendental logic, well, the laws of logic, again, are known, they're properly basic beliefs.

So the law of non -contradiction, law of excluded middle. We don't deduce those or infer those from the existence of God.

We know them to be the case. But now we can ask, given that we know that there are laws of logic, what must be the case in order for there to be laws of logic?

That's a transcendental argument. So I don't even know what it means to a transcendental

God to justify transcendental logic. If the claim there is that God must exist in order for there to be logic, well, that's the argument.

That's not the premise of the argument. That's what we're arguing for in the argument. We're starting with the assumption that there are laws of logic, which

I think, I would hope an atheist would grant in the first place, that there are laws of logic. And then we're arguing that if there are laws of logic, then there must be a metaphysical foundation for those laws of logic, namely the existence of God.

And that's what I argue in my paper. But there's no circularity there. Let me put it this way.

So I've written this paper, or co -authored this paper on arguing from God from the laws of logic.

It's been criticized by professional philosophers.

There have been a number of critiques, some by Christian philosophers, some by atheist philosophers.

And Greg Welty and I are in the process of responding to these criticisms. One criticism that no one has offered, no professional philosopher has offered, is that it's a viciously circular argument in the way that this objection is being posed now.

So that's not to say that that in itself shows it's not a good objection, but it's rather suspicious that no professional philosopher, academic philosopher who's critiqued our argument has pointed that out.

I think as we can - Last, I don't want these questions to dominate the questions.

There's just a couple more. I'm skipping over so that we don't, we'll give you a break. But here's one last question here.

And I think it's a good one that would be good to clarify. He says, what would James say to someone who says the existence of the universe is the precondition of logic, morality, uniformity, knowledge, et cetera?

I guess when we say that God is the necessary precondition, many skeptics think, well, you could just replace that with anything.

Why is it not the case that you can't use the universe for the preconditions here? Well, of course, it depends what you mean by the universe.

Okay, so is the universe being defined as the physical cosmos, the space -time continuum?

If that's what we mean by universe, that the physical universe, that is a precondition, then

I'm going to say, well, the problem is that the universe defined that way doesn't have the kind of properties or qualities that could account for logic, morality, and uniformity.

For example, moral norms, I think, can only be grounded in a person.

It's only a person who can issue moral imperatives. And even atheists, some atheists, recognize that moral imperatives have to come from a personal source.

Hello? You're holding to some sort of - I'm sorry, I kind of decomposed for two seconds. You're good.

Okay, we're back? Can I - You're good. Yeah, unless you're defining the universe in maybe sort of pantheistic terms, and then there are other critiques that would have to be offered there.

But the argument for, take the argument for logic, for example. So the argument from logic argues that if there are laws of logic, then these laws of logic have to ultimately be understood as divine thoughts.

They are thoughts that exist necessarily. Now, the universe is not a thinking thing.

The universe contains thinking things, but the universe, it does not have a mind.

The universe doesn't have a necessarily existent mind. So the universe doesn't have the kind of features or qualities that would make it the ground, that would enable it to ground things like laws of logic, necessary truths, moral norms.

And of course, the universe can account for its own uniformity. That really would be viciously circular to say that the universe is what accounts for its own uniformity.

No, the uniformity of the universe is something that itself needs to be accounted for.

So in short, the universe just isn't up to the job.

All right. I do apologize for some people. I don't know how much, if you realize this, Dr. Anderson, but you're a pretty popular guy.

So there are a lot of questions, but obviously you cannot answer all of them. So I'm - I'm going to tell my daughters that when

I get home. Yeah, that's right. Three more questions and then we'll wrap things up to give you a little rest there.

And I don't want to scare him away so that he never comes back on again. What's up with that? Assuming that you might, a little wink there.

I know you're a busy guy. So we do - Sure, I'll come back. Oh, awesome. Okay, so Simon asked the question, do you move from tag to the gospel and urge unbelievers to repent and believe in Jesus?

Is tag kind of, how do you make that transition? Because obviously that's where we want to get to.

Yeah, I do. And of course we have to. Tag itself,

I think is a powerful argument to refute a broad sweep of unbelieving worldviews.

But tag itself doesn't get you to the gospel. And it doesn't get you to the point of presenting

Christ as Lord and Savior. Although there's a sense in which the Lordship of Christ, the absolute

Lordship of Christ is one of the motivating factors for the transcendental archaic. But the best way

I can answer this question in brief is to say that if you buy my book, why should

I believe in Christianity? Oh, great. I want people to know that there's no shame here. Yeah, available in all good bookstores.

That will lay out exactly how I make the argument right up to the point of the gospel.

I begin, basically what I do in that book is I lay out a summary of the Christian worldview because I want to argue for Christianity as a package deal.

I don't want to take elements of the Christian worldview and try to argue for them in isolation from other parts.

So I lay out what is a Christian worldview? And then I give arguments in support of the existence of God, which is one component of this worldview.

God having revealed himself in a verbal divine revelation in scripture, and then move to the revelation in Christ as the son of God and the resurrection of Christ.

And of course you have to do this sequentially because even if you're arguing for Christianity as a package, you can't say everything at once.

So you have to say certain things in a certain order. And so I focus on different elements, but basically putting the pieces together.

It's like having a jigsaw puzzle and saying, okay, here's one piece, here's another piece, here's another piece, but I've already told you what the final picture is going to be when all these pieces are in place.

And then at the end of this, once you've made a case for scripture as the word of God, for Jesus as the incarnate son of God, who died for our sins, was buried and rose again on the third day as scripture testifies, then you have the gospel message presented there.

And the obvious question is, are you going to trust in this Jesus or not? Are you going to repent of your rebellion against God and embrace the man who claimed to be the only way to the father, the way, the truth, and the life?

And so actually my book ends with a gospel appeal, an appeal to trusting in Christ.

And I would say, if your apologetic doesn't go there, it's not an apologetic.

It's not a Christian apologetic at all, unless it ends up with a gospel invitation.

Very good. All right, next question. I often encounter Kantianism. How do I respond to the claim that it is irrelevant whether I hold to this or that worldview in order to account for experience?

I want to know where this person lives, where they encounter Kantianism. It's there.

I've encountered it. Yeah. They're in the internet roaming around. Yeah, I mean, it depends.

It depends what version of Kantianism you're talking about. I mean,

Kant himself would not have agreed that it doesn't matter what worldview you hold to in order to account for experience, because Kant himself offers a transcendental argument where he thinks a certain worldview, now it's his own sort of quirky transcendental idealism, that's his worldview that he thinks is vindicated by his transcendental argument.

So that's not even a Kantian claim, that it doesn't matter what worldview you hold in order to account for experience.

But the problem with this claim is that it's not actually engaging with the argument.

So if I argue, for example, that the laws of logic imply the existence of God or presuppose the existence of God, and someone says to me, well, it doesn't matter what worldview

I hold in order to account for the laws of logic. My response is, you haven't engaged with the argument.

You've basically just blown off the argument. I've given you an argument that a particular worldview needs to be presupposed or is objectively presupposed by the laws of logic or by laws of morality or by scientific method or whatever.

Don't just blow it off and say, I don't need that worldview to account for it.

I've just given you a reason why you do. So either you're gonna engage with that argument to say where the argument goes wrong or you're not.

And that's the test of whether someone's a serious thinker or not. Are they going to, if you offer an argument in defense of a particular worldview, are they gonna engage with that worldview or are they going to basically change the subject?

Because that's often what's going on. People just wanna change the subject or blow up a smoke of dust to try and distract from the actual arguments that are being offered.

Very good. Next question here. If tag is sound, does it in principle refute all doubt about the fact that God exists?

I had a couple of issues with that question, but yeah. Yeah, I think it, I think

I understand what the question is getting at. I mean, a few qualifications, as I said earlier,

I don't think there's just one version of tag. So I think there are different ways of formulating the argument that focus on different aspects of our rational capacities.

But if there is a sound version of tag, then is it going to remove any individual person's doubt?

Not necessarily because they may not grasp the argument or they may have doubts about the premises of the argument or the inferences.

Because the thing is, you can have a sound argument. If an argument is sound, all that means is that its premises are true and its conclusion follows from its premises.

Its conclusion is necessitated by its premises. So an argument can be objectively sound and it may actually convince no one because of deficiencies in the person, not necessarily mental deficiencies.

There could be all kinds of deficiencies. They may not grasp the argument. They may be confused about its premises and so forth.

So since doubt is a psychological phenomenon, a sound tag in itself is not going to remove all doubt.

That doesn't mean that it's worthless because a sound argument is a very valuable thing.

And the more you explain the argument, hopefully the more you can help a person see that it is a good argument, that it is a sound argument.

So it's not going to be sufficient for that. But also I wanna go back to the distinction I made earlier, that tag itself is not the basis for our certainty about the existence of God.

No one needs a transcendental argument to know with certainty that God exists.

That comes through natural revelation and it doesn't come through a philosophical argument.

The philosophical argument is a means of vindicating the claims of the knowledge of God.

Right, okay. Now I did say three. Can I squeeze in one more? I've lost count. So you could have just gone ahead anyway and I wouldn't have -

There's a lot of questions here. I feel bad that, I mean, they're not so many, but I didn't wanna overburden you there.

Let's do one more. One more, okay. This one's interesting one. This one's a fun one here. Someone's saying here,

I am someone who self -reports, I don't think I know that God exists. Can you give an analysis of what it is you think

I am doing by that statement? Am I lying? Am I self -deluded? I actually think that's a very good question because I think a lot of people say, the presupposition that says, you know that God exists, you're just suppressing.

Biblically, that's true. We believe that there's a sense in which that's happening. But what happens when the person says, I don't know

God exists. Would you call me a liar? What's up with that? Yeah. No, it doesn't necessarily entail that the person is lying.

I mean, I think there is a category of cognitive suppression or self -deception and self -deception doesn't necessarily imply that there's something immoral per se going on or that someone is necessarily deluded.

But like you, Eli, I follow the teaching of scriptures. That's my starting point.

So scripture says that the existence of God is clear from the creation. And that at some level, everyone knows that God exists, even though they suppress it.

That's gonna be my starting point for interpreting these claims. Now, I think there is some room about this interpretation here.

I think it may be consistent with Romans 1 to say that some people through their suppression have actually lost a knowledge of God, or at least they've lost a consciousness of the knowledge of God.

So there are different ways, perhaps, of finessing out the claims in Romans 1 about the natural knowledge of God and exactly what the consequences of this suppression are.

But if someone self -reports and says, I don't think I know that God exists. I don't think

I even believe that. I don't think they're lying to me. I don't say, no, really you do.

Why don't you just fess up? But rather what I'm going to try and show them is, well, okay, maybe that's how things appear to you right now.

That's your current understanding of your cognitive state. But I'm gonna try and argue that a lot of the things that they take for granted actually presuppose the existence of God.

So even if they don't have a conscious awareness of some knowledge of God, it doesn't mean that at some deeper level that there isn't some sort of theistic assumptions or theistic presuppositions at work in their overall cognitive system.

So lying, no. Self -deluded, I don't think is the right way to say either because self -delusion carries connotations of mental illness.

I don't think that's the characterization there. But I think there's a reasonable category of self -deception or suppression.

Let me give you an example of this. So there was a philosopher who for a while argued that he did not exist.

That actually the statement I exist was false and that our belief in our own existence is an illusion.

Was he crazy? No, I mean, he wasn't pathologically deranged.

Was he lying? Did he not actually believe it? No, I think he was serious about what he was saying.

But somehow he had convinced himself by argumentation that he didn't exist.

That as a person, as a first person subject of knowledge he didn't actually exist, that this was illusory.

So there's something clearly very complex going on here. And actually that was a consequence of his intelligence but he was using his intelligence to reach a conclusion that I think many of us would say is it's absurd and goes against common sense.

So it's not a question of intelligence. It's not a question of whether someone is just being fraudulent or something like that.

I think some people really can convince themselves of things that deep down they know better.

But of course, this is my interpretation of an atheist claims from a Christian perspective and atheists have their interpretations of my claims.

They think I'm deluded. They think I've got wish fulfillment or whatever.

They've got their epistemology and their psychological models for explaining my theistic belief.

Fine, they have a right to do that. That's not actually gonna settle the debate. The debate is, does

God exist and are there good arguments for the existence of God? So I don't wanna spend a lot of time talking about the particular psychological status of atheists unless someone brings it up like here and asks me an answer to that question.

I'm more interested in, are there actually good reasons for believing that atheists are dependent on the existence of God, whether they acknowledge it or not?

Well, very good. Thank you so much. That was really, really good. And I'm sure people are fine and people are still sending in questions.

Sorry, folks. If you really wanna know more about what Dr. Anderson has to say, you can go and bother him and email him a bunch of questions.

Or - No, no. Check out his blog at Analogical Thoughts, right?

Is that what it's called? Analogical Thoughts, yeah. If you search that out, you'll probably find it. Okay, and you got a lot of stuff there.

And on YouTube, I think you have some stuff on Sermon Audio as well where you go into some apologetic stuff. I don't put stuff on YouTube, but maybe other people take my stuff.

I have stuff on there. So thank you so much for that. I hope that you guys have found this helpful.

Real quick, Dr. Anderson, if someone was like, hey, this is a really interesting discussion. I really am interested in presuppositional apologetics.

What are three books you would suggest people just to dive into as an introduction, in your opinion?

Three books on presuppositional apologetics. Right, someone's like,

I'm interested. Where can I go to learn more about this stuff? Okay, you're putting me on the spot because if I give you three, of course that's gonna leave out certain ones.

People are gonna say, when are you - No, no, I get it. So, okay, I'll say here are three, and I won't name one of my own books, okay?

So I will exclude my own books. But give us the title. What's the title you were thinking of your own book?

Well, there's Why Should I Believe Christianity? It's my sort of application of a presuppositional methodology to the question of why we should believe in Christian worldview.

But leaving that aside, I mean, that's not really a book about presuppositionalism per se. So if someone wants to get a good handle on presuppositional apologetics, the three books

I would recommend, first of all, I would say, read Cornelius Van Til's book, Christian Apologetics.

It's one of the shorter ones, and it doesn't go into a lot of issues that Van Til goes into in other places.

But I think it's probably the most accessible. And certainly anyone who asks, where should

I start with Van Til? I say, start with his Christian Apologetics. I think it's quite well self -contained and digestible.

So there's that. Secondly, Greg Banson's book, Van Til's Apologetic, I think is really indispensable.

And in a sense, you get a twofer there because half of it is just quotations from Van Til and then the commentary from Banson.

So Banson's, Van Til's Apologetic is a superb resource. And then thirdly,

I recommend John Frame's book, Apologetics. It was originally called Apologetics, The Glory of God.

It's now been renamed Apologetics, A Justification of Christian Belief. It's a revised edition.

And I think that will offer people a different perspective on presuppositionalism that sort of balances out some of the things that you find in Banson's work.

So John Frame's textbook on Apologetics, I think would round out the reading if you pick those three.

All right, well, thank you very much for all of that. Once again, guys, on the 12th, I'm gonna be having

Dr. Gary Habermas. And on the 16th, I'll be having Emilio Ramos to discuss the connection of presuppositional apologetics with reformed theology.

Thank you so much, Dr. Anderson, for joining us. This is gonna be very useful for folks. And thank you so much for your time.

Hopefully we can get you on again in the future. Sounds good. Thanks Eli. All right, take care, everyone.