(Deleted Scene) From Interview on the Wise Disciple (Bahnsen vs RC Sproul)

But, you know, a few preliminary comments here, I'll say some things, you can say some things, because we're kind of not starting at the beginning, and I think at the outset there were some important statements that were made from both sides.

Warfield, Kuyper, and the Roots of the Apologetics Debate

Both Sproul and Bonson had the opportunity to make kind of like an opening statement of sorts, you know? So a couple interesting things that I noticed, the first thing that I thought was interesting was that Sproul said that this whole disagreement about, you know, apologetic methodology has its roots in the differences between B .B. Warfield and Abraham Kuyper.

And so Warfield and Kuyper, they were contemporaries in the early 20th century. These were both, as far as I can tell, theologians of the highest order. Warfield was a Princetonian, so he was a professor at Princeton, Kuyper was, he was a politician?

He was a lot of things.

He was a politician, yeah. And he heavily influenced the thought of Van Til, this idea of the importance of worldviews, this idea of antithesis, that because we have different starting assumptions, the believer and the unbeliever, we're kind of at like this diametric point of opposition in which there's no neutrality.

And so that aspect of Warfield's, I'm sorry, of Kuyper's thought heavily influenced Van Til, but Van Til comes to a different conclusion because in light of the worldview situation, right? Unbeliever has a worldview, believer has a worldview, there's no neutrality.

Abraham Kuyper fallaciously concluded that therefore apologetics is useless, and of course Van Til would disagree with that. There is no common ground, Kuyper would say. There's no common ground, and so what's the point in doing apologetics, right?

So interesting influence there, but of course Van Til doesn't bite that bullet all the way. Right.

That's good. That's good. And Warfield took issue with that as well, particularly the usage of evidence Warfield thought was totally appropriate when doing apologetics. So that was good. The other thing of note, there's a lot of what Dr. Sproul said, but one of the other things that I thought was interesting, maybe you can comment on this, he was concerned that presuppositional apologetics furthers a false divide between science and theology, or maybe science and the Christian faith, such that we Christians have been assigned to kind of a ghetto, you know, like a reservation where we're allowed to have our private faith, but we can't go around directly confronting the scientists and philosophers of the secular age.

Sproul was concerned that presuppositionalism led to further isolationism because of the particular methodology of, I guess, refusing to make arguments for God's existence and for the Bible as his word, but instead assuming those things at the outset.

What do you think?

The Transcendental Argument Is Still an Argument

Right. Well, I think that this is where R .C. Sproul is confused, and I think he doesn't have a proper understanding of the presuppositional method. Take for example, the argument that's at the heart of the presuppositional method, which is the transcendental argument.

To say that the presuppositionalist doesn't give arguments just completely bypasses the fact that Bonson gives a transcendental argument. It is an argument. You might not agree with the argument. You might not like the argument.

You might not think the argument accomplishes what presuppositionalists think it accomplishes, but it is an argument, and it takes a very traditional form. For example, if I can give you the form of a transcendental argument, which is not particular to the presuppositional school of thought, you see lines of transcendental arguments within Aristotle when he's trying to prove the necessity of the laws of logic, that in order to even deny the laws of logic, you have to presuppose them even in their denial.

He proved the laws of logic by the impossibility of the contrary. You have, of course, without boring your audience, the language of transcendental argumentation is often associated with Immanuel Kant.

We can't get into that now because it is a very intricate philosophy. Here's the basic form of a transcendental argument. When we talk about logic and argumentation, as you know, Nate, we can often use symbols like X and Y, and X and Y or whatever letter you use can stand for a proposition, which is a statement that is either true or false.

A proposition would be, I like to go to the beach. That statement is either true or false, and that can stand for either X, Y, Z, or whatever. The basic transcendental formulation would be for any X, any proposition to be the case, Y must be the case because Y is the necessary precondition for X.

X is the case. Therefore, Y must be the case. That is not a fallacious form of argumentation. That's a traditional transcendental argument, and we need to plug in our propositions within those letters.

So if I could formulate a transcendental argument for God's existence using that form, I can say premise one, for knowledge to be possible, Christianity must be true. Premise two, knowledge is possible, therefore Christianity is true.

Now, you might not agree with that argument, but there's nothing fallaciously circular about it, but there is some sense of circularity to it because if I prove my conclusion, then what does the conclusion show, if not that I had to presuppose Christianity to even formulate the argument, right?

I'm showing what are the necessary preconditions are for the very intelligibility of argument itself or knowledge. And so R .C. Sproul kind of equated the transcendental argument or the presuppositional approach with kind of like a dogmatic, arbitrary assertion, the Bible is true, and that's it.

You have to take my word for it. We don't give you further argument. We can't talk about evidence, and that's just a faulty misunderstanding of the methodology and form of argumentation on the part of R .C. Sproul.

So, this raises we don't even need Bonson and Sproul. We can just you and I can talk. Because it raises some questions, but actually I think I'll probably hold off and ask those as the conversation goes along between Bonson and Sproul.

But this is really great. I think we're setting the table in the right way. Something about Bonson that he said in his kind of opening remarks that I thought was really interesting is he directly dunks on Bayesian-style apologetics, you know?

Bayesian meaning arguing for Christianity in the Christian worldview, you know, the existence of God, the historicity of the Bible, in terms of probability. You know, there's a probability calculus that gets introduced into the notion of arguing for Christianity, and some Christian apologists today argue this way.

You know, they'll argue for Christianity, they'll say things like, well, you know, the resurrection of Jesus is highly probable, you know? And Bonson pointed out that the Bible not only does not speak this way, but apparently teaches the opposite.

So, I thought that was really interesting. Yes, that's going to be the key difference. And this is where you have Sproul when he says, for example, he's concerned about the loss of the purity of Calvinism and an intrusion of neo-orthodoxy in Calvinistic methodology.

That's kind of an indirect reference to fideism. He saw presuppositional argumentation as a form of fideism in terms of which one makes an assertion, we believe it by faith, and we don't give reasons for it.

And so that leads to subjectivism, because anyone can make a dogmatic assertion, and therefore that form of argumentation will leave the unbeliever with an excuse. But the irony there is that the nature of a transcendental argument actually, if successfully argued, would be the argument that would leave the unbeliever without an excuse, because a transcendental argument seeks to prove a conclusion with 100 certainty.

There's, if a transcendental argument is successful, you cannot rationally and meaningfully deny the conclusion of the argument. Does that make sense? And so if that's the case, and if the presuppositionalist argues successfully transcendentally, then that's more certain than any of the traditional proofs, because the traditional proofs for God's existence along classical lines like the cosmological argument, the teleological argument, the moral argument, those are all probability.

And they're nonspecified. They prove an ambiguous deity that requires more information, right? So there's this idea of fideism, if anything. Transcendental and presuppositional argumentation is literally on the complete opposite side of the spectrum of fideism, because it's arguing for certainty that we can know, and we could have justification for the certainty that we're arguing for.

I don't think any of the traditional proofs can get you that, and so I think R .C. Sproul was mistaken here.

Biblical Assurance, Evidence, and Presuppositional Neutrality

Right. I have a question, I'll bring it up again later, but the issue of certainty comes up because Bonson is sort of in his own way reiterating what the Bible does teach. The Bible does teach that Christians can have a full assurance of the things in which they place their faith, and so it's not coming out of nowhere.

Here's one other thing that I thought was really interesting about what Bonson said. Bonson said, and I wonder if this is what you've been telling me, Eli, because I am trying to do my due diligence and have a book on Van Til right now, so there is that.

But Bonson said in his opening remarks, and this is right at the end of his opening remarks, he said, Christians do present the facts. And then he said, we are evidentialists. What he said was at the end, we present the facts and the evidence within a presuppositional framework where they make sense.

Now, you verbatim have told me this, so it sounds like Bonson is not opposed to evidentialism as long as the Christian includes the presuppositional framework. Is that right?

Yes, and that's just a roundabout way of saying that Bonson is rejecting neutral facts, presuppositional-less data. He's saying the Christian must not be neutral. Indeed, neutrality is not giving due reverence to the Lord of the facts, and it's impossible.

So not only should we seek to be neutral and allow for neutrality in terms of the data that we're disputing with the unbeliever, it's irreverent to do that because we're defending the very God who defines the facts.

Bonson points out that it's actually impossible to do that as well because we all have presuppositions. So that's kind of just a roundabout way of getting that point across, which is really the twin poisons, I call them, when I teach presuppositional apologetics, I call them the twin poisons of neutrality and autonomy.

And so what Bonson would point out is the classical approach with the utilization of the traditional proofs. The problem is they, in the way they've been traditionally presented, they allow for, whether intentionally or unintentionally, the assumption of neutrality and autonomy with respect to how we could interpret facts and with respect to the ability of man's capacity to properly interpret the facts.

So Bonson is going to be careful for those two things, and he's going to say once you don't use a presuppositional approach, you're allowing these things to sneak in. And autonomy and neutrality is a no-no intellectually, and they're definitely a no-no if you want to be consistently Calvinistic.

Right. I was going to say, I think Spruill is going to slap back on the autonomy thing a little bit, but let's just jump right into the discussion here.