Impossibility of the Contrary Explained

Alright, in this video, I want to talk about the concept, or the phrase, the impossibility of the contrary. What do presuppositionalists mean when they say that the Christian worldview is true by the impossibility of the contrary?

Now if you know anything about presuppositional apologetic methodology, the centerpiece of the apologetic method is the transcendental argument, okay? And when we argue transcendentally, we are arguing by the impossibility of the contrary.

So, we are in essence arguing that the Christian worldview must be true. The state of affairs in which the Christian worldview is true is necessary for human experience to be meaningful, intelligible, for there to be rationality and knowledge, these sorts of things.

Now that's the claim, of course, right? But the transcendental argument seeks to do that.

But what do we mean?

Let's kind of break apart this idea of the impossibility of the contrary. When we say that something is true by the impossibility of the contrary, this refers to the impossibility of, say, truth. The truth of some position that's not the Christian position.

When we say that Christianity is true by the impossibility of the contrary, we're saying that on some other non-Christian presupposition, rationality is not possible. Basically, we're speaking of the logical impossibility of some other position that is not the Christian position.

So that's basically what we are saying, in essence. Now what do we mean by the contrary when we speak of the impossibility of the contrary? When we speak of the contrary, we are basically using informal language to refer to the contradictory of the Christian worldview position.

So anything that contradicts the Christian worldview is impossible. That's basically what we're trying to say. So contradictory statements cannot both be false at the same time and in the same way. If a position is false, then its contradictory is true and vice versa.

So when we speak of the impossibility of the contrary within the context of the Christian worldview, we're basically saying that Christianity is true and every other position that's not the Christian worldview is false.

Or Christianity is rational and every other position that's not Christianity is irrational. And that's basically to say that only the Christian worldview is rational and that would have to be true if we're arguing that Christianity is the necessary precondition for human intelligibility or rationality or whatever the case may be.

That's just the nature of the claim. Now why do Christians, or presuppositionalists more specifically, argue? Why should we argue along these lines of impossibility of the contrary? Well, I actually think that scripture both prescribes and describes this method.

I think scripture both implicitly and explicitly argues in this way. And I want to show you kind of through a scripture or two, my line of reasoning here. So I don't think that the Bible is teaching us transcendental arguments in that philosophical sense, but the principles of this idea of something being true by the impossibility of the contrary is right there in scripture.

So scripture provides the soil out of which transcendental principle arises. So let's take a look, for example, at Isaiah chapter 44 verses 6 through 8, which reads, I am the first and the last. Besides me, there is no God who is like me.

Let him proclaim it. Let him declare and set it before me since I appointed an ancient people. Let them declare what is to come and what will happen. Fear not, nor be afraid. Have I not told you from of old and declared it?

And are you my witnesses? Is there a God besides me? There is no rock. I know not any. Now notice from within the Christian worldview, we have an omniscient God, a God who knows.

All things.

We're not including open theism here. I do not believe that open theism is a biblical position, but that's a topic for another video.

Okay.

So we're assuming that Christian theism teaches that there is an omniscient God. He knows all things of the past, all things of the present, all things in the future, all contingencies, all these sorts of things.

So let's illustrate this idea of the impossibility of the contrary or the contradictory from this concept here. So I'm going to lay it out in a deductive form so you can kind of see the reasoning behind this.

Okay.

So premise one, God knows everything. Premise two, if there is another God, then God would know that there is another God. Premise three, God does not know that there is another God. Four, which is the conclusion, therefore there is not another God.

And so if you think about that, any position that posits another God, namely the contradictory to what we're just asserting is false. It would be impossible for the contradictory to be true.

Okay.

Let's take a look, for example, at Colossians chapter two, verses two through three, which says Christ in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. So let's break this down in kind of a deductive form so you can see the reasoning behind here.

Premise one, if all of the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden in Christ, then outside of Christ, there are no treasures of wisdom and knowledge. Premise two, all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden in Christ.

And this is believed by Christians on the basis of scripture. So if you're a Christian, you affirm the Bible. This is something we need to affirm from within the Christian worldview. Three, therefore, outside of Christ, there are no treasures of wisdom and knowledge, and therefore wisdom and knowledge on the contrary or contradictory position is impossible from within the Christian perspective.

And that's why we as presuppositionalists be trying to be consistent, we'll argue along these lines.

Okay.

So how is the impossibility of the contrary used within an apologetic argumentation? This is typically illustrated through the use of what we call internal worldview critiques.

Okay.

What's an internal critique? An internal critique is when you hypothetically grant the truth of your opponent's position and show that on their own presuppositions, their own view, they lose the foundation for whatever we're arguing about, whether it's rationality, knowledge, logic, or, you know, the intelligibility of science, the inductive principle, these sorts of things.

And so we engage in an internal critique to show that the non-Christian position on his own presuppositions can't ground those very things. And so the goal of the internal critique is to reduce the opponent's position to absurdity, to expose the opponent's position as arbitrary, or to expose it as inconsistent or incapable of rendering human experience intelligible, anything along those lines.

Now, can the Christian successfully do that?

Yes.

Does the Christian always successfully do that?

No.

Right.

This is going to be, this takes practice as we're interacting with the unbeliever and asking questions and letting them lay out their worldview and kind of interacting with their worldview and their presuppositions and these sorts of things.

And the Christian, of course, is going to have to also be able to explain how the Christian worldview does in fact provide what we call those necessary preconditions for, say, something like logic, knowledge, uniformity, the inductive principle, and intelligible experience in general.

Okay?

So that's kind of the two sides of the presuppositional coin. We show that the Christian worldview, given our presuppositions, provides a foundation for these things. And then given the hypothetical truth of the unbeliever's position, you know, they can't ground those things.

And in fact, they destroy all of those things and the meaningfulness of all those things. Now again, we can claim this, but that needs to be demonstrated through rational argumentation and discourse. And of course that takes work and practice, but that's, you know, when we're doing apologetics, it requires us to, you know, practice.

You're going to mess up a bunch of times and hopefully you get better at it the more that you do it. I know that I don't do it perfectly all the time either. So, so there we go. So that's what we mean by the impossibility of the contrary.

That kind of short little phrase which encapsulates the transcendental principle that the presuppositionalist is trying to employ within the context of apologetic interactions. Well, I hope this is helpful and I'm going to try to do other videos in the future where I lay out some aspect of the presuppositional approach and try my best to explain it so that folks can understand what we're talking about.

All right.

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Bye bye.