Thursday, June 15, 2006

In Defense of Presuppositionalism?

Does anyone have any suggestions for good, clear, short, water-tight statement of the presuppositionalist case?

What I think I’m after is something like “without the Triune God of the Bible, no knowledge, facts, science, logic … because...”.

I’m very much enjoying this sort of thing:

Only the Christian theory of knowledge, based as it is upon the absolute authority of the Word of God speaking in Scripture, makes communication of any sort possible between men. Without this presupposition men would have no integrated selves and the world would be a vacuum. Without this presupposition of the Christian theory of being there would be no defensible position with respect to the relation of men and things. Neither men nor things would have discernible identity. There would be no science and no philosophy or theology, for there would be no order. History would be utterly unintelligible….

[O]nly the truth of Christianity furnishes a foundation for the laws of logic…. Logic that does not rest upon the presupposition of the creation of the laws of reality in general and of human thought in particular is a pure form without content. To talk about the law of contradiction without asking with respect to the metaphysical foundation upon which it rests is to talk into the air.

Cornelius Van Til’s In Defense of the Faith volume 1: The Doctrine of Scripture (Philipsburg, Presbyterian and Reformed, 1967) p61f

But it feels a bit too much like mere assertion. I could use it spelling out a bit more for it to really be convincing.

3 comments:

DavidF said...

Rushdoony's book on Van Til

or Garver's essay primer on presuppositionalism

Marc Lloyd said...

Ta. Will seek them out sometime. Honeymoon or Sabbath reading, I wonder?

Marc Lloyd said...

Just to say that Joel Garver's A PRIMER ON PRESUPPOSITIONALISM is available here:

http://www.joelgarver.com/writ/phil/presupposition.htm

And the Rushdoony book must be:

By what standard? : an analysis of the philosophy of Cornelius Van Til by Rousas John Rushdoony, (1959) Philadelphia, Penn : Presbyterian and Reformed (Reprint by Chalcedon Dec 2003) ISBN 187999805X