Crash Course in Presuppositional Apologetics: Preconditions of Intelligibility

Ultimate Authority and the Christian Worldview

Hey, it's John here again from WarnerMore .com. Welcome back to the Crash Course in Presuppositional Apologetics. The first video we talked a little bit about ultimate authority, and I tried to show that necessity, or why ultimate authority is important.

Every question comes back to a foundation. It's going to come back to something that we base all of our other claims in life on. There's actually some verses that go along with that. 1 Corinthians 2 .14 says, The natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God.

So, the ultimate authority of the natural man, of those who aren't Christians, is not the authority of the Scripture.

Now, what about the believer?

Well, the believer believes that Christ himself is the one in whom are hidden all treasures of wisdom and knowledge, as Colossians 2 says, 2 -4. So, in another one, Matthew 28 .18, Jesus came and spoke to them, saying, All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth.

So, we believe that all authority is laid up in Christ, and the Word of God. So, here's a question. How do we know which authority is the correct one? Everyone seems to have an authority. Everyone seems to have a worldview that's based off of something.

How do we know which one's right? Now, I want to suggest to you that the right one is the one that answers the preconditions of intelligibility. In other words, the one that can account for reality. You might say, well, what does that mean?

Let me show you.

Preconditions of Intelligibility and the Christian Worldview

In order to understand anything accurately, a person must know that their mental and sensory faculties are valid, the laws of logic are upheld, and mathematics are sound, and that the future is going to be like the past.

If we don't understand these things, then there is no intelligibility. If we assume that nature was not uniform, there's no way we could make it through nature in a systematic, organized fashion. But yet, we do do that, right?

We do drive on the right side of the road. We do get out of bed the same way, thinking that gravity is still in effect the same way it was the day before. In the same way, morality is something we assume is true.

In order to function, the laws of math don't change. 2 plus 2 is not 4 one day and 5 the next. These are all things that we must assume in order for anything to be comprehensible. So, what worldview makes sense of this?

Now, the Christian worldview makes the claim that it can account for these things. All preconditions are accounted for in Christ, in whom are hidden all treasures of wisdom and knowledge. The laws of logic are accounted for by many verses that validate them.

For a more extensive list on each of these different components, the laws of logic, the laws of morality, the reliability of sense perception, the uniformity of nature, and the laws of mathematics, check out the link below, and there's a whole list of scriptures that talk about these things.

But suffice it to say, all treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden in Christ. That is the Christian claim, that he is the validator of all these sense perception and rational thinking. We rely on him for that.

Now, in order for that to be the case, it must be an internally consistent system. It must be a system that doesn't contradict any of these things. For instance, if it upholds logic, it must be logical, correct?

It doesn't mean everything we understand, it just means that there are no logical contradictions in it. In order to understand sense perception, it must not deny that. Every other worldview ends up denying that or running into a contradiction somewhere along the way.

Next Video: Contradictions in Competing Worldviews

In the next video, we're going to look at some of those contradictions, to see why Christianity and the character of God are the only things that we can root our ultimate authority in.