those autonomous perspectives actually support nonautonomous

conclusions. The favor of the natural man is thus gained at the cost of
reinforcing the unbeliever’s claim to ultimate authority and failing to
intellectually challenge the alleged self-sufficiency of his reasoning.

127. On “predication,” see chap. 1, n. 67.

Chapter 3

A Simple Summary and Illustration

An introductory overview of the presuppositional approach to apologetics would
be beneficial before we consider deeper philosophical and psychological aspects
of apologetical argumentation. One of the compelling features of
presuppositionalism is its accessibility and suitability to believers at all levels of
academic sophistication. It can profitably be explained to school children, be
utilized by college students in any field, and satisfy graduate students and
professors in philosophy. This summary will assume very little.

We have already covered the features that are characteristic of presuppositional

apologetics in a very general fashion. In chapter 1, our opening exposure to the
distinctive contribution of Cornelius Van Til emphasized three things. First,
apologetical argument is religious in nature, involving one’s ultimate
commitment in life; thus, the apologist must both argue for the supreme
authority of Christ and argue in a way that exhibits that commitment (1.1).
Second, a person’s method of reasoning not only determines, but is itself
determined by, what he fundamentally believes about reality (God, man, and
the world); the apologist’s theory of knowledge should be self-
consciously worked out as part of his total system of Christian belief (1.2).
Third, unbelievers themselves need to be pressed by the apologist to
become self-conscious about the implications of their own underlying
philosophies (whether implicitly assumed or explicitly professed); by
demonstrating that these outlooks render reasoning meaningless or
unintelligible, the apologist indicates that the unbeliever has no intellectual
ground on which to stand in attacking the faith and, even more, proves the
Christian worldview to be true from the rational impossibility of the contrary
(1.3).

Van Til refers to the same three general concepts when he sums up part 1 (“The
Structure of My Thought”) of the principal book intended to set forth his
approach, The Defense of the Faith: "Herewith we are led back to the
question of Scripture as identifying itself as the Word of God and of the
system of truth set forth in Scripture as that in terms of which alone
human experience in all of its aspects has meaning."1 The three
components singled out for mention are the Bible’s self-attesting
status, Christianity constituting an entire system of truth, and the defense of that
self-attesting system by displaying it as the precondition for the intelligibility of
human experience. Let me explain.

(1) What are we to make of this book called “the Bible”? Van Til taught that
Scripture must “identify itself.” There are opinions and standards of assessment
outside the Bible that might be used to indicate how to categorize this book,
what qualities (virtues or defects, literary or historical or philosophical) it could
or does have, and how to interpret its function and place in human experience.
But the standard that the Christian applies is the testimony of the Bible
about itself; its character and purpose are believed on its own attestation
(or witness)—being “self-attesting.” Therefore, Scripture has final authority in
the reasoning of the believer. (2) What Scripture gives us, moreover, is not
simply random bits of religious insight—the theological and ethical
“conclusions” that we should affirm. It sets forth “the system of truth,” an entire
worldview that simultaneously reveals how we know what we know
(epistemology), what the nature of reality is (metaphysics), and how we ought to
live our lives (ethics). The parties to apologetical discussion must realize that
their respective methods of reasoning and evaluating are consonant with their
conflicting messages as a whole; that is, they function as they do because of the
“system” of which they are a part. (3) How then can the Christian system of
thought (with its final, self-attesting standard) effectively and intellectually
challenge the non-Christian’s system of thought (with its own final, self-attesting
standard) ? Van Til proposed that the Christian worldview “alone” provides an
outlook wherein “human experience in all of its aspects has meaning.” The
alternative views reduce to absurdity because they render reason, science, ethics,
etc., nonsensical or incoherent.

We will use this same three-point outline in the following summary of Van Til’s
presuppositional apologetic.

3.1 Apologetics as a Conflict Between Final Authorities

Most of us are accustomed to thinking of philosophy or academic debate in
terms of intellectual detachment from the living of daily life. (Disputes over the
nature of “substance” or about the analytic/syn-thetic distinction do not, after all,
seem terribly relevant to grocery shopping, getting the kids dressed, or fixing the
plumbing). Questions about the way we reason and think may be important, but
they are ethically indifferent or “neutral” matters for scholarly investigation and
debate. The moral quality of our lives is not an issue here, for ethics is thought to
pertain to our conduct (daily affairs), along with the motives for our concrete
behavior and inner attitudes (especially toward other persons). This general
outlook is so widespread that it hardly rises to the level of conscious
consideration and choice; we just take it for granted. Reasoning is one thing, and
ethics is another. That is why Van Til’s insights have such a revolutionary
effect on most people. He insists (as does Scripture) that the way in which we
use our minds—the way in which we reason, how we evaluate claims to the
truth, the standards we adopt for knowing, etc.—is itself an ethical matter. This
part of human behavior called “reasoning” is as much subject to moral
obligations and assessments as anything else we do in the world. The “greatest”
commandment teaches us to love the Lord our God with all our minds, too (Matt.
22:37)—to take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ (2 Cor. 10:5).

Thus, apologetical dialogue between the believer and the unbeliever exhibits not
only two conflicting points of view (as to whether God exists, Jesus rose from
the dead, etc.), but also two different moral stances. The believer and the
unbeliever recognize two different final standards for living—including that
aspect of living known as thinking, reasoning, and arguing. They are divided by
their ultimate commitments, either to Christ or to some other authority (usually
themselves). Van Til pointed out that sin comes to expression in the unbeliever’s
intellectual conduct and standards: “When man has become a sinner, his
intuitive powers are as sinful as his reasoning powers.... Every man by
his sinful nature seeks violently to suppress the voice of God. "2 “Thus
the scientist in the laboratory and the philosopher in his study are
both dealing with their materials either as a covenant-keeper or as a
covenant-breaker. All of man's acts, all of man's questionings, all of
man's affirmations, indeed all of his denials in any dimension of his
interests, are covenantally conditioned."3
Christians must not fall into a false intellectualism here. “Intellec-tualism in the
church has often made an easy compromise with the Socratic dictum that
knowledge is virtue. Men often speak as though the only thing that the
sinner needs is true information. This... is not the case. Man needs true
interpretation, but he also needs to be made a new creature. ... Sin is not
only misinformation; it is also a power of perversion in the soul."4 The non-
Christian’s opposition to the truth about God or the gospel does not arise from
legitimate intellectual problems with the faith, but from a rebellious and
rationalizing heart. “The sinner's problem from his point of view is to cast
doubt upon this evidence, to make it appear as though the evidence were
not clear. ... It is the effort of every man to put the blame for his failure to
serve God upon the elusive character of the evidence for
God's existence."5

The two opponents in an apologetical encounter are thus intellectually living by

two different ethical standards, but they are also arguing according to conflicting
final standards for knowledge itself. They disagree on the ultimate authority that
should be used to warrant or justify what a person believes as true. Suppose that
a certain statue at Piccadilly Circus in London were described in a tour book as a
depiction of Eros with his bow drawn, but that, because you have actually been
there to see the statue, you assert that the tour book is in error. If your friend
replies that those who write tour books are more likely to have the facts straight
than you, your friend has attributed more authority to the tour book than to you
on this matter. What he would claim to “know” about the statue of Eros is
determined by the authority he has chosen to follow. Now, in the far more
important dispute between the Christian and the unbeliever, they too have
conflicting final authorities for knowledge. As Van Til put it, they disagree on
the “reference point” to be used in assessing truth-claims and interpreting
experience. (In our illustration, one person gained his perspective from the
“point of reference” given in the tour book, while the other’s ultimate point of
reference was his memory of an eyewitness experience.) Believers and
unbelievers have different presuppositions that give them their orientation to the
world, to reasoning, and to living. “Either one thinks in terms of the authority
of Scripture, making reason and all its activities subject to this authority,
or else one acts and thinks on one's own ultimate authority.”6 Or, as Van
Til wrote elsewhere: believers should “agree that human experience and
human logic must be interpreted in terms of God and Christ rather than
that God and Christ must be interpreted in terms of human experience
and logic.”7

A person cannot have it both ways regarding his final standard or ultimate
reference point. He presupposes and reasons either according to the authority of
God or according to some other authority.8 Attempting to be neutral about God’s
ultimate authority in determining what we know is a result of a bad attitude
toward God’s ultimate authority. It is a way of saying that one does not really
need the work of Christ to save him in his reasoning. “It is the self-
authenticating Christ who ... shows us that in all our efforts as ultimate
self-interpreters we are actually opposing the salvation that he offers.
Every bit of supposedly impersonal and neutral investigation, even in the
field of science, is the product of an attitude of spiritual hostility to the
Christ through whom alone there is truth in any dimension.”9

This is a critical point for apologetics. Van Til’s approach recognizes and points
out that religious conversion entails a change in a person’s point of reference or
ultimate standard for knowing and interpreting anything at all. Hence,
apologetics is at base an intellectual conflict over ultimate authorities for
knowing and living. "When the sinner has by God's grace in Christ
received this new light and this new power of sight then he sees all things
in their proper relationships. Formerly he stood on his head while now he
stands on his feet. Formerly he referred all things to himself as the final
point of reference. Now he refers all things to God his Creator, and to
Christ his redeemer as the final point of reference. His conversion was a
Copernican revolution. It was not accomplished by steps or stages. It was
an about-face. Before his conversion he looked away from the God and
the Christ of Scripture. After his conversion he can't see a fact in
the world that he does not wish to deal with to the glory of God. The
words of Paul, 'Whether ye eat, or drink, or do anything else, do all to the
glory of God,' are now his motto. Deeply conscious of his continued
sinfulness he is, none the less, now, in the core of his being, a lover
instead of a hater of God.''10

It is now fairly easy to answer the age-old question of the relationship between
faith and reason. Van Til affirmed the importance of reasoning and using our
intellect as a tool, but he also understood that this tool would be utilized
according to the direction, standard, or “reference point” of some ultimate
authority (for ethics as well as for knowing). The unbeliever uses his reason
(reasoning) in the service of his own personal authority, desires, and rebellion
against God. The believer has been brought to a change of final authorities:
"When God has reasoned with us and changed our minds till our every
thought is brought into captivity to the obedience of Christ, we must use
our minds, our intellect, our reason, our consciousness, in order to
receive and re-interpret the revelation God has given of himself in
Scripture. That is the proper place of reason in theology. There is no
conflict between this reason and faith, since faith is the impelling power
which urges reason to interpret aright.''11

Of course the unbeliever finds this utterly unacceptable. But by what standard is
it judged unacceptable? The unbeliever as much as the believer follows some
ultimate standard, although he may be reluctant to admit it. For the unbeliever,
the tool of reason (reasoning) would be transformed into the final judge for
knowing anything (as though there could be some abstract thing12 that might be
venerated as “Reason”), thus replacing the final authority or standard of God’s
revelation.13 Van Til was keenly aware that "we cannot speak of
human reason in general, or of the human consciousness in general. . . .
'Reason' in the case of the non-Christian is employed by such as assume
themselves to be self-sufficient, while 'reason' in the case of the Christian
is employed by those who through regeneration have learned to think of
themselves as creatures of God and of their task in life as keeping
covenant with God."14 This is the focal point of the argument between him and
the believer. The Christian does not have two ultimate authorities for interpreting
life and directing his thinking, one that he shares with the unbeliever and one
that is unique to his religious stance. "The Christian knows that he would
interpret nature wrongly, due to the sin that is within him, unless he be
enlightened by Scripture and guided by the Holy Spirit. Strictly
speaking, he should therefore not refer to two sources with respect to his
general interpretation of life. If he says, 'Scripture and reason convince
me that this or that is true,' he should mean by this that his reason, as it
looks at everything in the light of Scripture, has convinced him. If,
therefore, he appeals to the unbeliever on the ground that nature itself
reveals God, he should do this in such a manner as to make it appear in
the end that he is interpreting nature in the light of Scripture."15

Apologetics involves a conflict over ultimate authorities—that is, a conflict over

our presuppositions or final standard. What should be the source of a person’s
presuppositions? For the unbeliever, it will be some authority for reasoning other
than the word of God, while for the believer it is God’s revelation. “For science
and philosophy, as well as for theology, we frankly take our basic
presuppositions from Scripture.... There are no central truths on which all
[believer and unbeliever] agree.16 The disagreement is fundamental and
goes to the heart of the matter."17

DIFFERENT FINAL COURTS OF APPEAL18

When man fell it was therefore his attempt to do without God in every
respect. Man sought his ideals of truth, goodness and beauty somewhere
beyond God, either directly within himself or in the universe about him.
God had interpreted the universe for him, or we may say man had
interpreted the universe under the direction of God, but now he sought to
interpret the universe without reference to God; we mean of course
without reference to the kind of God defined above. . . .

What then was the result as far as the question of knowledge is

concerned on man's rebellion against God? The result was that man tried
to interpret everything with which he came into contact without reference
to God. The assumption of all his future interpretation was the self-
sufficiency of intra-cosmical relationships.19 . . .

We have felt ourselves compelled to take our notions with respect to the
nature of reality from the Bible. It will readily be conceded that such a
notion of reality as we have presented could be received upon authority
only. Such a notion of being as we have presented is to be found
nowhere except in the Bible. The Bible is taken so seriously that we have
not even left any area of known reality by which the revelation that comes
to us in the Bible may be compared, or to which it may be referred as to a
standard. We have taken the final standard of truth to be the Bible itself.

It is needless to say that this procedure will appear suicidal to most men
who study philosophy. Is it not by the help of man's own reason that we
are to think out the nature of reality and knowledge? To accept an
interpretation of life upon authority is permissible only if we have looked
into the foundations of the authority we accept. But if we must determine
the foundations of the authority, we no longer accept authority on
authority.20 Authority could be authority to us only if we already knew that
it had the right to claim authority. Such could be the case only if we knew
in advance the nature of that authority. Thus we would have a theory of
being already taken for granted at the outset of our investigation. In this
manner we could not give a fair hearing to opposing views.

A modern way of stating this objection to our position is found in the

words of Dr. Edgar A. Singer's Notes on Experience and Reflection.2'1
Dr. Singer tells us it is the business of philosophy to ask, How do we
know? In other words, according to Singer the epistemological question
can and must be asked without saying anything with respect to the
ontological question.

Is this position of Dr. Singer tenable? Suppose it is true, for argument's

sake, that such a being as we have described God to be, does actually
exist. Would not such a God have the right to speak to us with authority?
Are we not, by saying that the question of knowledge is independent of
the question of being, excluding one possible answer to the question of
knowledge itself? If the Being of God is what, on the basis of Scripture
testimony we have found it to be, it follows that our knowledge will be true
knowledge only to the extent that it corresponds to his knowledge. To say
that we do not need to ask about the nature of reality when we ask about
the nature of knowledge is not to be neutral but is in effect to exclude the
Christian answer to the question of knowledge.

That Singer has in effect excluded from the outset the Christian answer
to the question of knowledge appears from the fact that in his search for
an answer to this question he affirms that we must go to as many as
possible of those reputed to have knowledge (p. 5). The notion of going
to One whose opinion may be more valuable than the opinion of others
even to the extent of being authoritative over the opinion of others is not
even considered. In paradise, Eve went to as many as possible of those
who were reputed to have knowledge. God and Satan both had a
reputation for knowledge. Apparently God did not think well of Satan's
knowledge, and Satan did not think well of God's knowledge—but each
thought well of his own knowledge. So Eve had to weigh these
reputations. It was for her a question as to, How do we know?

The problem that Eve faced was a difficult one. God told her that she
would surely die if she ate of the forbidden tree. Numerically there was
only one in favor of one and only one in favor of the opposite point of
view. Thus she could not settle the matter of reputation by numbers. She
herself had to decide this matter of reputation by a motion and a vote.
God claimed that he was the Creator. He claimed that his being was
ultimate while Satan's being was created and therefore dependent upon
God’s being. Satan said in effect that she should pay no attention to this
problem of being. He told her she should decide the question, How do we
know? without asking the question, What do we know? He said she
should be neutral with respect to his interpretation and God's
interpretation of what would take place if she ate of the forbidden tree.
Eve did ignore the question of being in answering the question of
knowledge. She said she would gather the opinions of as many as
she could find with a reputation for having knowledge and then give the
various views presented a fair hearing.22

We should observe particularly that in doing what she did Eve did not
really avoid the question of What do we know? She gave by implication a
very definite answer to that question. She made a negation with respect
to God's Being. She denied God's Being as ultimate being. She affirmed
therewith in effect that all being is essentially on one level.

At the same time she also gave a definite answer to the question How do
we know? She said we know independently of God. She said that God’s
authority was to be tested by herself. Thus she came to take the place of
ultimate authority. She was no doubt going to test God's authority by
experience and reflection upon experience. Yet it would be she herself,
who should be the final authority.

It would appear then that the theory of being that we have presented fits
in with the notion of the Bible as an authoritative revelation of God. Such
a being as the Bible speaks of could not speak otherwise than with
absolute authority.23 In the last analysis we shall have to choose between
two theories of knowledge. According to one theory God is the final court
of appeal; according to the other theory man is the final court of appeal.24
...

Sin will reveal itself in the field of knowledge in the fact that man makes
himself the ultimate court of appeal in the matter of all interpretation. He
will refuse to recognize God’s authority. We have already illustrated the
sinful person's attitude by the narrative of Adam and Eve. Man has
declared his autonomy as over against God.

This means that in the total picture that man must seek for himself, he
must go to Scripture as the final court of appeal. He learns from nature
still, but what nature teaches him must be brought into relationship with
what the Scriptures teach in order that it may be properly understood. . . .

In other words, on Montague's scheme25 of things the mind of man must,

for all practical purposes, take the place of God in the Christian scheme
of things. To talk about what can or cannot exist according to logic is but
to swing a sword in the sky unless it is first determined at what point logic
meets reality.26 According to the Christian story, logic and reality meet
first of all in the mind and being of God. God's being is exhaustively
rational. Then God creates and rules the universe according to his plan.
Even the evil of this world happens according to this plan. The only
substitute for this Christian scheme of things is to assert or assume that
logic and reality meet originally in the mind of man. The final point of
reference in all predication must ultimately rest in some mind, divine or
human. It is either the self-contained God of Christianity or the would-be
autonomous man that must be and is presupposed as the final reference
point in every sentence that any man utters. . . .

The entire idea of inscripturated supernatural revelation is not merely

foreign to but would be destructive of the idea of autonomy on which the
modern man builds his thought. If modern man is right in his assumption
with respect to his own autonomy then he cannot even for a moment
logically consider evidence for the fact of the supernatural in any form as
appearing to man. The very idea of God as self-contained27 is
meaningless on his principles. The idea of such a God, says the modern
follower of Kant, is fine as a limiting notion.28 Taken as a limiting notion it
is quite innocent and even useful. For then it stands merely for the ideal
of exhaustive rationality. And science requires such an ideal. But the idea
of such a God as taken by orthodox Christians, that is as a constitutive
rather than as a limiting concept, is meaningless; it would kill the idea of
pure facts as the correlative to pure rationality. And the idea of pure fact
as a limiting concept is as necessary to modern science as is the idea of
pure rationality.29

It is therefore logically quite impossible for the natural man, holding as he

does to the idea of autonomy, even to consider the "evidence" for the
Scripture as the final and absolutely authoritative revelation of the God of
Christianity. . . .

Their position allows for sacred books and even for a superior book. But
the one thing it does not allow for is an absolutely authoritative book.30
Such a book presupposes the existence and knowability of the self-
contained God of Christianity. But such a God, and the revelation of such
a God in the universe and to man, are notions that, as has already been
observed, the natural man must reject. So he will naturally also reject that
which is simply the logical implicate of the idea of such a God and of
such a revelation. . . .

Hence the idea of human autonomy can find no place in the truly
Christian system any more than can the idea of chance. The human
being is analogical rather than original in all the aspects of its activity.
And as such its activity is truly significant. . . .
When we deal with the non-regenerate consciousness, we must think of
it as it is according to its adopted monistic assumption.31 Hence we
cannot grant that it has any right to judge in matters of theology, or, for
that matter, in anything else. The Scriptures nowhere appeal to the
unregenerated reason as to a qualified judge. When Scripture says:
"Come, let us reason together," it often speaks to the people of God, and,
if it does speak to others, it never regards them as equal with God or as
really competent to judge. The unregenerate man has knowledge of God,
that is of the revelation of God within him, the sense of deity which he
seeks to suppress. Scripture does appeal to this sense of deity in man,
but it does so and can do so only by denying that man, when acting on
his adopted monistic assumption, has any ability or right to judge of what
is true or false, right or wrong.

MAN NOT AN AUTONOMOUS AUTHORITY32

The second attribute of Scripture the Reformers spoke of is that of

authority. This authority is involved in the idea of necessity. Scripture is
necessary because an authoritative revelation is necessary. We have
seen that the sinner will not of himself recognize that he is abnormal in
his interpretation of life. Hence he also refuses to recognize that God is
the ultimate while he himself should be nothing but the immediate starting
point in the knowledge situation.33 The sinner seeks to be autonomous.
He will, therefore, seek to set himself up as a judge over that which
presents itself to him as revelation. Now if the revelation of God came to
men in such a way as to recognize the sinner as autonomous and able to
judge about the truth of revelation of himself, it is certain that the sinner
would never escape his position of autonomy. There would then be no
one to challenge it. God himself would be strengthening man in his self-
conceit. Accordingly we find that revelation comes to the sinner with a
claim of absolute authority over man. It asks man to submit his thought
captive to it in obedience. Thus the concepts of necessity and authority
are involved in one another. There would be no necessity for anything but
for an authoritative revelation while, on the other hand, there was an
absolute necessity for an authoritative revelation.
3.2 An Implicit Clash of Entire Worldviews (Thus
Methods Too)
The disagreement between believer and unbeliever extends to the very heart of
their differing outlooks on life, which includes their contrary convictions about
the nature of reality, and thus involves their fundamental division over the
proper method for knowing anything (learning, interpreting, proving, etc.).

Van Til saw that the dispute in apologetics was not simply over isolated
religious claims or conclusions, but was in principle a dispute regarding entire
worldviews. “It is indeed impossible for any man to make any statement
about any fact of experience without doing so in terms of an all-inclusive
view of reality. And we can only rejoice if there seems today to be some
measure of appreciation of this fact, for to the extent that this is the case
we need no longer concern ourselves with the idea of 'neutrality.' And to
the extent that such is the case, we may start from the assumption
that every bit of scientific search for facts already proceeds upon a basic
view with respect to reality. ... All men presuppose, whatever the name
they use for it, a synoptic view of reality as a whole. We continue to call it
metaphysics. "34 Alternatively: “For convenience we speak of this total
outlook on reality as a world and life view."35

“The fight between Christianity and non-Christianity is, in modern times,

no piece-meal affair. It is the life and death struggle between two
mutually opposed life and world-views."36 The Christian, perhaps thinking
that his argument with the non-Christian is simply over the truth of such external
matters as creation (versus evolution), may set out to prove from science that the
alternative is simply implausible, but he soon realizes (if he is at all thoughtful)
that the two of them also disagree over the genuine character of science and
scientific theorizing. The Christian, perhaps thinking that his argument with the
non-Christian is simply over a fact such as Christ’s resurrection from the dead,
may set out to prove from history that this event occurred, but he soon realizes
(if he is at all thoughtful) that the two of them also disagree over the proper
character of historical research, reasoning, and evaluation. The Christian,
perhaps thinking that his argument with the non-Christian is simply over the
philosophical coherence and practicality of the biblical perspective, may set out
to defend it or offer reasons in support of it, but he soon realizes (if he is at all
thoughtful) that the two of them also disagree over the nature of meaning, utility,
possibility, explanation, etc.

Because they operate out of the context of conflicting worldviews, the believer
and the unbeliever will find—if they are consistent and their dialogue pushes
into deeper reasons for differing with each other—that their disagreement covers
their theory of knowledge (method and criteria of knowing) as well as what they
claim to know (or what cannot be known) about God, the world, man, life,
conduct, or values. Thus, Van Til taught: "If man does not own the authority
of Christ in the field of science, he assumes his own ultimate authority as
back of his effort. The argument between the covenant-keeper and the
covenant-breaker is never exclusively about any particular fact or about
any number of facts. It is always, at the same time, about the nature of
facts. And back of the argument about the nature of facts, there is the
argument about the nature of man. However restricted the debate
between the believer and the nonbeliever may be at any one time, there
are always two world views ultimately at odds with one another."37

This explains why the apologist must not see his dispute with the unbeliever as a
matter of faith (the Christian perspective) versus reason (the non-Christian
perspective). It is rather one worldview (a faith that controls reasoning) versus
another worldview (a different faith that controls reasoning). The worldviews
may not be explicitly explained or acknowledged in the dispute, but they
determine the course of the argument. "All men do their thinking on the basis
of a position accepted by faith. If your faith is not one which has God in
Christ speaking infallibly in Scripture for its object, then your faith is in
man as autonomous. All of one's reasoning is controlled by either of
these presuppositions."38 In apologetics we must become accustomed to
thinking in terms of “package deals.” The unbeliever has a certain view of
reality, man, etc., and his theory of knowledge and method of reasoning not only
are used to support that particular view, but also are determined by it; it is a
package deal. Likewise, the believer has a certain view of reality, as well as a
theory of knowledge that supports, and is determined by, that view of reality; it
too is a package deal.
The believer’s “package” should not be reduced to some isolated or abstract
elements of it, as though what we defend is “theism in general” rather than the
specific character of the full Christian conception of God.39 “From the point of
view of the sinner, theism is as objectionable as is Christianity. Theism
that is worthy of the name is Christian theism. Christ said that no man
can come to the Father but by him. No one can become a theist unless
he becomes a Christian. Any God that is not the Father of our Lord Jesus
Christ is not God but an idol."40 Nor does the believer’s “package”
(worldview) allow for an isolation or abstraction of its epistemology and
metaphysic. Van Til denounced an apologetical strategy that says, "First the
inspired Bible and secondly the divine Christ," because you cannot
intelligibly have one without the other. "We must rather take the Bible
simultaneously with Christ and with God as its author. "41 As we say, it is a
package deal.

Accordingly, in apologetics the believer’s package deal (worldview) stands over

against and challenges the unbeliever’s package deal (worldview). In principle,
if the advocates of the two differing positions were cognizant of their unspoken
assumptions about reality and knowledge, and if they were completely consistent
with their presuppositions, they would disagree on everything with each other.
"Insofar as men are aware of their most basic alliances, they are wholly
for or wholly against God at every point of interest to man. ”42 Van Til
explained: "It is the idea of the interrelatedness of every aspect of the
revelation of God [in nature and in word] to man that is all important. It is
only when this interrelatedness is stressed that, as Christians, we can
effectively challenge the wisdom of the world and show that it has been
made foolish by God. Only thus can the total interpretation of life and the
world, as given by Christ in Scripture, be that on which alone every
aspect of human experience must be based in order to have significance.
... If then the Christian is to fulfill his calling he must set the Christian
approach to men and things over against that of modern science,
philosophy, and theology. If he does not do so in all three fields he
cannot effectively do so in any one of these fields."43 The Christian
apologist must become “epistemologically self-conscious” about the broader
philosophical implications and influences on his method of reasoning, and he
must—in pursuit of the very task of apologetics—seek to draw out into the open
the details of the worldview that comes to expression in the non-Christian’s
method of reasoning, making the unbeliever epistemologically self-conscious as
well.

TOTAL PICTURES OF LIFE, REALITY, AND METHOD44

Our view of reality or being involves a view of knowledge and of ethics

even as our view of knowledge and ethics involves and is based on our
view of being.45 . . .

The philosophers have sought for a unified outlook on human

experience. Philosophers have sought for as comprehensive a picture of
the nature of reality as a whole as man is able to attain. But the universe
is composed of many things. Man's problem is to find unity in the midst of
the plurality of things....

When seeking to persuade men to accept the truth of the system of

doctrine revealed in Scripture, we speak of our Christian view of life. And
we subdivide this Christian view of life into three main sections, the
Christian theory of being, the Christian theory of knowledge and the
Christian theory of ethics or behavior. We must set off the Christian view
of life sharply from the non-Christian view of life.46 Basic to all the
differences between the Christian and the non-Christian views of life is
the fact that Christians worship and serve the Creator, while non-
Christians worship and serve the creature.47 Through the fall of mankind
in Adam, the first man, the representative of all men, all became
creature-worshippers. But through the redemption wrought by Christ and
applied to his people by the Holy Spirit, the chosen ones have
learned, be it only in principle, to worship and serve the Creator more
than the creature. They now believe the theory of reality offered in
Scripture. They now believe in God as self-sufficient, in the creation of all
things in this universe by God, in the fall of man at the beginning of
history and in the "regeneration of all things" through Christ.

But it is just as important to have a Christian theory of knowledge as it is

to have a Christian theory of being. One cannot well have the one
without at the same time also having the other. Modern thought is largely
preoccupied with the theory of knowledge. As Christians we shall
therefore find it necessary to set the Christian theory of knowledge over
against the modern form of the non-Christian theory of knowledge. Even
so we shall have to make it plain that our theory of knowledge is what it is
because our theory of being is what it is. As Christians we cannot begin
speculating about knowledge by itself. We cannot ask how we know
without at the same time asking what we know. . . .

The Christian view of man and the Christian view of method are alike
aspects of the Christian position as a whole. So also the non-Christian
view of man and the non-Christian view of method are alike aspects of
the non-Christian position as a whole. That such is indeed the case will
appear as we proceed. . ..

The Reformed apologist cannot agree at all with the methodology of the
natural man.48 Disagreeing with the natural man's interpretation of
himself as the ultimate reference-point, the Reformed apologist must
seek his point of contact49 with the natural man in that which is beneath
the threshold of his working consciousness, in the sense of deity which
he seeks to suppress. And to do this the Reformed apologist must also
seek a point of contact with the systems constructed by the natural man.
But this point of contact must be in the nature of a head-on collision. If
there is no head-on collision with the systems of the natural man there
will be no point of contact with the sense of deity in the natural man.50 So
also, disagreeing with the natural man on the nature of the object of
knowledge, the Reformed apologist must disagree with him on the
method to be employed in acquiring knowledge. According to the doctrine
of the Reformed faith all the facts of nature and of history are what they
are, do what they do and undergo what they undergo, in accord with the
one comprehensive counsel of God. All that may be known by man is
already known by God. And it is already known by God because it is
controlled by God.

The significance of this for the question of method will be pointed out
soon. For the moment this simple fact must be signalized as the reason
which precludes the possibility of agreement on methodology between
the Reformed theologian and the non-Christian philosopher or scientist.

CONFLICTING THEORIES OF REASON AND EVIDENCE51

The third and final legitimate use of reason, according to Hodge, is that it
must judge of the evidences of any revelation that comes to it. Faith, he
argues, is "an intelligent reception of the truth on adequate grounds"
([Theology] Vol. I, p. 53), and Scripture never demands faith "except on
the ground of adequate evidence" (ibid.).

On the surface at least this manner of statement again seems to assume

that all men, regenerate and non-regenerate, agree on the nature of
reason and evidence. But this is contrary to fact. The average
philosopher and scientist today holds to a non-theistic conception of
reason and therefore also to a non-theist conception of evidence.
Assuming the ultimacy of the human mind and of impersonal laws of logic
he must and does reject that which is, objectively, the best of evidence
for what revelation teaches, for example with respect to the existence of
the transcendent God and his creation of the universe. Following Kant he
simply asserts that evidence, to be intelligible, must not go beyond
experience, and that to assert that a God exists who is not subject to the
categories of space and time, is to assert that which is without meaning.
If therefore we say to him that Revelation does not expect him to accept
anything that is not credible according to his rules of evidence, this is, in
effect, to ask him to reject the gospel.

It is accordingly necessary in our day, if we wish to bring out the truth for
which Hodge is contending, to argue that only in theism can we find a
true theory of reason and of evidence, and therefore true harmony
between reason and revelation. To this must then be added that deep
down in his heart even the natural man knows that theism is true and that
he has concocted a false theory of reason and of evidence which he
should reject.52 . . .

But on the monistic assumption of the non-Christian it would be

contradictory to believe in the resurrection of Jesus as the Son of God.
The whole idea of God as transcendent is contradictory of the monism
that underlies the unbeliever's views. Hence also he can allow no
evidence to be genuine that pretends to prove the activity of the
transcendent God of Christianity in human history.53

3.3 The Refutation of the Unbeliever’s Presuppositions

A popular evangelical apologist once told me that he appreciated the way in
which presuppositional apologetics diligently exposes the unspoken assumptions
of the unbeliever, as well as its reminder to us all that defending the faith is
ultimately a matter of entire worldviews encountering one another.54 The
problem, he said, is that we are then left in something of a “presuppositional
standoff.” Neither worldview (with its final standards) can disprove the other
worldview (with its final standards). With that he also indicated how little
perceptive reading he had done in Van Til’s works.

Van Til’s point is not simply that everybody has assumptions. There is little
specific help for a successful program of apologetics in that observation (which
nearly anybody can make). Indeed, left there, the insight might woefully suggest
that nature and history could be just as well interpreted on a non-Christian basis
as on a Christian one—a thought that was abhorrent to Van Til. Having referred
to the blindness of the natural man, he wrote: “We dare not say that nature
and history lend themselves quite as well to the non-Christian as to the
Christian interpretation. ... All looks yellow to the jaundiced eye. But for all
this we would still maintain . . . that he who reads nature aright reads it as
the Christian reads it." And then Van Til immediately added that the apologist
must “press the objective validity of the Christian claim at every point."55
The job of apologetics is to move beyond the recognition of the presuppositional
nature of the disagreement between the believer and the unbeliever and show
whose presuppositions are correct. Thus Van Til wrote: “We ought to find
small comfort in the idea that others too, for example, non-Christian
scientists, have to make assumptions. . . . We all make assumptions, but
we alone do not make false assumptions. The fact that all make
assumptions is in itself a mere psychological and formal matter.
The question is as to who makes the right assumptions or
presuppositions."56

In Van Til’s outlook, it is not sufficient for the apologist merely to combat the
claims that Christianity is not reasonable, merely to neutralize the criticisms that
arise from science and history, and merely to exhibit and vindicate the
Christian’s ultimate assumptions. The best defense of the faith would require
taking the offensive. Thus, the apologist “may be quite proficient in warding
off the attack as far as details are concerned, but he will forever have to
be afraid of new attacks as long as he has never removed the foundation
from the enemy's position."57 Apologetics requires us to remove the
foundation of the unbeliever’s argument. When the non-Christian criticizes the
Christian worldview, the defender of the faith should "ask his critics to show
him the epistemological foundation on which they stand when they raise
their objection. Can they, on their foundation, even have any such thing
as an intelligible philosophy of fact?"58 When the two presupposed
worldviews are explicated and set over against each other, Van Til contended,
“We as Christians alone have a position that is philosophically
defensible."59

We can rehearse briefly why this is the case. The thing that is most characteristic
of the philosophy of the unbeliever is its presumption of moral and intellectual
autonomy from God. The non-Christian is not philosophically self-sufficient and
cannot make sense out of experience apart from God, but he still desires (and
claims) to be independent of his Creator. Van Til pointed out: “Man has
declared his independence from God. We may therefore call him the
would-be autonomous man. This would-be autonomous man assumes
that he is ultimate and properly the final reference point in predication,
i.e., reality must be interpreted by man in terms of man."60 Van Til said of
the natural man, who is dead in trespasses and sin, that he “wants to be
something that he cannot be. He wants to be 'as God,’ himself the judge
of good and evil, himself the standard of truth. . . . The non-regenerate
man takes for granted that the meaning of the space-time world is
immanent61 in itself, and that man is the ultimate interpreter of this world
”62—instead of receiving God’s revelation as the ultimate point of reference for
his thinking, reasoning, and interpretation of the world or experience. While
perhaps not explicitly declaring it to be so, the would-be autonomous man
conducts his reasoning and living as though he were not a creature of God and
under obligation to the word of His Creator. Van Til said: “ I have frequently
explained that by the term 'autonomous man’ I mean the idea of a man
who virtually denies his createdness. . . . With the entrance of sin
man was no longer willing to obey the law of his maker. He became a
covenant breaker. He sought to be a law unto himself, that is, he sought
to be autonomous. . . . Men virtually assume or presuppose that they are
non-created. ... Is this too broad and sweeping a statement to make
about all sinners? The daily newspaper is unintelligible on any other
basis. There are those who worship and serve the creature and there are
those who worship and serve the Creator. This is the simple
differentiation with which I am concerned. I try to call men back to the
recognition of the fact that they are creatures of God by challenging their
false assumption of their non-createdness, their autonomy or
ultimacy."
63

The Christian worldview maintains the indelibly revelational character of every

fact of the created universe and the all-controlling providence of God in
governing every event of history. The non-Christian’s autonomous philosophy is
not “neutral” on such crucial points, but obviously works on assumptions that
are quite contrary to them. "Why live in a dream world, deceiving ourselves
and making false pretense before the world? The non-Christian view of
science: (a) presupposes the autonomy of man; (b) presupposes the
non-created character, i.e., the chance-controlled character, of facts;64
and (c) presupposes that laws rest not in God65 but somewhere in the
universe."66 In defending the faith, the Christian cannot allow the suitability or
legitimacy of using such autonomous presuppositions with respect to any aspect
of knowledge, as though they can make sense of the natural world but must then
be set aside when one thinks about the supernatural aspects of God’s revelation
in Scripture. As Van Til noted, " If we claim that we are independent in our
knowledge, and think we can do without God at any point, we may as
well assert that we are ready to do without him at every point."67

How can the apologist refute the presuppositions of autonomous reasoning? Van
Til taught that it could certainly not be by adopting them as our own! "How
can we call unbelieving man to repentance by belief in what Jesus Christ
the Son of God and Son of man suffered on the cross of Calvary and
through his resurrection from the dead, if we ourselves have first so
largely emasculated our thinking by adopting the very humanism68 from
which we are seeking to save them?"69 Van Til cautioned that
the defender of the faith "all too frequently employs uncritically the
conceptions of 'reason' and 'fact' as these are understood by those who
make no profession of Christianity. The result is that there is no teaching
of Christianity as a challenge to unbelief.”70

Rather than accepting the deceptive invitation of the unbeliever to approach the
apologetical dialogue in a neutral fashion—which in fact is to approach it in an
autonomous fashion—the Christian must argue that the unbeliever’s outlook
renders such philosophically crucial and critical notions as fact, reason,
experience, science, necessity, meaning, and morality unintelligible, due to the
incoherence of the unbeliever’s professed worldview." If then a non-Christian
should urge our pastor to take off his 'rose-colored glasses' and look at
the cosmos 'with the naked eye of reason,' or should appeal to
conscience to refute the interpretation of human experience as given in
Scripture, our pastor knows that to do so would be to take the ground
from under his own feet. Reason would then be truly 'naked' or formal; its
assertions would be as meaningless as the gyrations of a propeller of an
airplane engine without the airplane. If the facts could be said to exist at
all, they would be utterly interchangeable with one another.... It is only in
Reformed theology that we have a method of apologetics that meets the
requirements of the hour. It alone challenges the natural man in the very
citadel of his being. It alone is able to show how he who will not accept
God's interpretation of life has no coherence in his experience."71

So in presuppositional apologetics we seek to “remove the enemy’s foundation”

by reducing his worldview to absurdity, thereby rendering the claims that
constitute his case against the gospel unintelligible and demonstrating the
necessity of the Christian worldview if we are to make sense of argumentation
about, reasoning about, and interpretation of, any element of human experience.
Without the assumption of Christian theism, there would be no basis for
believing that there is order, connection, predictability, or necessity anywhere in
human experience. Van Til put it this way: “The scientist who is a Christian
therefore has the task of pointing out to his friend and colleague, who
is not a Christian, that unless he is willing to stand upon the Christian
story with respect to the world which has been redeemed through Christ,
there is nothing but failure for him. Scientific effort is utterly unintelligible
unless it is frankly based upon the order placed in the universe of created
facts by Christ the Redeemer. ... To those who are committed to the
position which interprets man in terms of a supposedly intelligent
procedure not based on biblical principles ... the answer to this must be
that the procedure of science and the procedure of philosophy cannot be
shown to be intelligible unless they are carried on on the presupposition
of the God who speaks to man in Scripture."72

Given the presuppositions of autonomous reasoning, it is not hard to see why

this is the case. In the first place, the “knower” is no different than anything else
in his environment; he is not distinguished by a “mind” that has the self-
consciousness and freedom to search for the truth, evaluate options, and make
intellectual commitments, for man has nothing more than a physical brain, which
—like every other natural object—is determined by chemistry, biology, and
physics. The “thinking” of this product of chance cannot warrant the notion of
universal, necessity, causal connections, or moral prescriptions. In the second
place, the “facts” that man encounters are likewise random and unconnected in
any way that would justify categorization, laws, or predictability. The
“standards” of logic or reasoning cannot be taken as objective or justified as to
their universality—or even applicability to the world of contingent material
facts, which is so different from them in character. The apologist must be honest
in pointing out how philosophically pathetic this “total picture” really is, rather
than flattering it by adopting such assumptions as a springboard for proving the
completely contrary viewpoint of Christianity. Van Til delighted in describing the
absurdity of what autonomous philosophy ends up with; for instance: “If you
have a bottomless sea of Chance, and if you, as an individual, are but a
bit of chance, by chance distinguished from other bits of chance, and if
the law of contradiction has by chance grown within you, the imposition of
this law on your environment is, granted it could take place, a perfectly
futile activity."73
The would-be autonomous man begins by taking for granted that he and God
would have to be on a par when it comes to interpreting the world, knowing
anything, or making moral judgments, but this “monistic assumption” (which
denies the significance of the Creator/ creature distinction for epistemology and
ethics) results in the destruction of the intelligibility of reasoning, science, and
ethics. Therefore, as Van Til maintained, Scripture does not grant that the
unregenerate man has any right to judge anything whatsoever,
consistently "denying that man, when acting on his adopted monistic
assumption, has any ability or right to judge of what is true or false, right
or wrong. "74 How can any sense, then, be made of the claims and
argumentation to which the unbeliever has appealed in his case against God
or the gospel? His reasoning against Christianity could only be intelligible if
what he were trying to disprove were instead true. This is the strongest form of
argument in favor of the Christian worldview: it must be secretly presupposed
even in the attempt to argue against it. The most compact and dramatic way of
summarizing Van Til’s apologetic that I have seen (or can imagine) is simply
these three words: "Antitheism presupposes theism.”75 Van Til immediately
explained: "One must stand upon the solid ground of theism to be an
effective antitheist.” This demonstrates the Christian worldview to be true from
the impossibility of the contrary. Or, as Van Til succinctly expressed it
elsewhere: "The only 'proof of the Christian position is that unless its truth
is presupposed there is no possibility of 'proving' anything at all.”76

Does this mean that for Van Til unbelievers know nothing whatsoever and
cannot make any useful contribution to culture? Not at all. It means that the
would-be autonomous man can never give an intelligible, coherent, or
meaningful account of how he is able to know anything or accomplish anything
culturally. The unbeliever’s failure is a rational or philosophical failure to make
sense out of knowledge, morality, beauty, etc. But because the unbeliever is
not actually what he thinks he is—and the world is not what he takes it to be—he
can within God’s world, as a creature made in God’s image, make intellectual
and cultural progress. Van Til held that "as for the cultural products of those
who are not Christians, we would follow Calvin in ascribing this to the
common grace of God that works in them. True, the natural man is not
blind in every sense. True, he is not as bad as he could be and as he will
one day be. Modern science, so far as it has been carried on by those
who are not Christians, has made marvelous discoveries of the true state
of affairs in the phenomenal world. But the whole point... is that unless it
were for the common grace of God there would be no discovery of any
truth and no practice of any goodness among those who are not
born again."77 Even the achievements of the non-Christian contribute to the
Christian’s apologetic, therefore, since such things would be unintelligible apart
from the explanation of them which the Christian worldview can offer.

This indicates that the unbeliever has actually been working and thinking in
terms of two conflicting worldviews—one which he openly professes and which
is autonomous in character, and another which he does not wish to acknowledge,
but which makes it possible to make sense out of language, math, science,
history, logic, ethics, and everything else in his experience and reasoning.
Accordingly, Van Til taught that when we defend the faith, our appeal is made to
the unbeliever’s suppressed knowledge of God, not to the professed
presupposition or point of reference that the unbeliever advocates. The apologist
must recognize, as Scripture teaches, that the natural man sins “against his better
knowledge.” In his heart of hearts, he is aware that what the Christian proclaims
and defends is the truth of God. Why is it that we as believers acknowledge this
truth and submit to the authority of the Savior, while others resist admitting the
truth and giving their lives over to Him? It cannot be because we are better or
wiser than others, according to Van Til; rather, “we shall, of course,
remember that all that we have received has been by grace . . . , [in
which case we] ought to be the humblest of all men.”78 Van Til’s approach
to defending the faith was, therefore, an intriguing combination of the strongest
and most aggressive attack upon the intellectual foundations of the unbeliever’s
reasoning and at the same time an exhibition and gracious acknowledgment of
the believer’s own grateful dependence upon God for everything he enjoys—
from the hope of eternal life to the philosophical ability to make sense out of
human experience. "Christians can bear witness of this God only if they
humbly but boldly make the claim that only on the presupposition of the
existence of this God and of the universe in all its aspects as the
revelation of this God is there any footing and verge for the interpretive
efforts of man. "79

THE ONLY RATIONAL FAITH80

In all this we have already been dealing with philosophy as well as with
science. No one can be a scientist in any intelligible way without at the
same time having a philosophy of reality as a whole.81 Christian
apologists often speak of scientism as being objectionable but of science
as being innocent with respect to the claims of Christianity. But surely this
cannot be the case. Anyone who has a philosophy of nature that is not
based upon the presupposition of what the Bible says about nature at the
same time has a view of God that is hostile to that which Christianity
proclaims.

Frequently Christian apologists plead with the scientists for a hearing by

saying that they are merely offering something additional to what the
scientist himself offers. Science, say these apologetes, gives us truth as
far as it goes, but it does not include the spiritual aspect of reality in its
vision.82 So Christianity merely asks men to see that they must add the
person-to-person or spiritual dimension to that of the impersonal and
mechanical. After all, these apologetes say, science deals and can deal
only with the quantitative aspects of reality. It is faith and faith only that
has a vision for spiritual things.

And then it is added that science, too, needs to build itself on faith.83 Did
not Aristotle show how all first principles are adopted by faith? The fact
that logic applies to reality is something that all men must believe, is it
not? So then Christians are only doing what non-Christians do. Both put
faith in something.

In this whole approach it is forgotten that the question is not one of

having or not having faith but of having the proper faith. Of course all
men start from faith. But the point is that the non-Christian starts from
faith in man as not a creature of God and as not a sinner before God,
while the Christian starts with his faith in Christ. It is the object of faith
that gives meaning to the faith one professes. There are only two
alternatives. The object of the non-Christian's faith is man as
autonomous, while the object of the Christian's faith is God as revealed in
Christ and in Christ as revealed in Scripture. “There is no person on
earth," says Wolthuis, “who lives without faith of some sort" (Op. cit, p.
48).84 This is true, but it is not true that therefore the Christian's faith
stands on a par with the non-Christian's faith as far as validity is
concerned. It is the Christian's faith in God as revealed in Christ that is
true faith. It alone gives an intelligible foundation to scientific procedure.
The Christian and the non-Christian position are never to be thought of
as intellectually on a par with one another. The Christian's faith is not
a blind faith, as is the faith of the non-Christian. The non-Christian
scientist may and does believe in the presence of order, but he has no
warrant for doing so.85 His assumed philosophy of chance points to the
opposite. The Christian's position is not merely just as good as the non-
Christian's position. Christianity is the only position that does not perse
take away the very foundation for intelligible scientific and philosophical
procedure. Christianity is the only rational faith!

CHANCE CANNOT PROVIDE A CRITERION86

How could unbelievers, unbelievers just because they have already

rejected God's revelation in the universe about them and within them by
a philosophy of chance and of human autonomy, ever concede that the
claims of the New Testament writers with respect to their inspiration by
God are true? The criterion they employ will compel them to deny it.87 It
is their criterion that must be shown to involve a metaphysics of chance.
Then, if the Spirit opens their eyes, they will see the truth.

To be sure, if Warfield's appeal to the natural man were of an nature,

then it would be well.88 Christ does ask the natural man to judge with
respect to the truth of his claims. But then he asks them to admit
that their own wisdom has been made foolishness with God. 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 anywhere between men. Without this presupposition men
would have no integrated selves and the world would be a vacuum.89
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. Finally, without the presupposition
of the Christian theory of morality there would be no intelligible view of
the difference between good and evil. Why should any action be thought
to be better than any other except on the supposition that it is or is not
what God approves or disapproves? Except on the Christian basis there
is no intelligible distinction between good and evil.

PRECLUDING CHRISTIANITY IS TO PRECLUDE JUSTIFIABLE

ORDER90

Man was told, in effect [when God gave the cultural mandate to Adam], to
be religiously engaged when he was making his experimentation in the
laboratory as well as when he is singing psalms in the church on Sunday.
If then science deals with the laws of nature it does give an interpretation
of the facts. If the scientist does not see the laws of nature as manifesting
the Creator redeemer, he is guilty before God.

As a sinner man seeks to suppress the revelation of God that speaks to

him through the created world. He holds under the truth in
unrighteousness. And when modern science is trying to understand
nature without placing it, from the outset, in relation to its creator and
redeemer, it is engaged in the sinful enterprise of repression. . . .

Modern science as a whole assumes that what Christianity teaches with

respect to nature cannot be true. Experimentation, we are told, needs or
presupposes the idea of an open universe.91 Immanuel Kant's position
with respect to the idea of pure contingency underlies the method of the
average non-Christian scientist today. The ideas of creation and of
providence as controlling all that comes to pass are therefore assumed to
be intolerable. The idea of experiment, we are told, assumes that at the
beginning of one's research one hypothesis is as good as another. If the
Christian therefore wants to get a hearing for his ideas of creation and
providence he must present them as one hypothesis among many.92 But
how can the Christian do this without betraying his own most basic
conviction? His own conviction is to the effect that the possibility of
successful scientific procedure depends upon the idea that God through
Christ controls whatsoever comes to pass. Nature is orderly because it is
the order of God93 that appears in it. He who does not hold this to be true
has not seen nature for what it is. "Nature" apart from God is, for the
Christian, a meaningless term.94 The non-Christian must tell us how
he will make it meaningful apart from God in Christ.

Again, modern science holds not only to the idea of pure contingency or
indeterminacy, but also to that of pure determinism.95 Modern science
insists that the order which it discovers cannot be that of a God who wills
it to be a certain way. The order of nature, we are told, is what it is
because of an impersonal unchangeable regularity (Cf. Morris Cohen,
Reason and Nature).

APPEALING TO THE UNBELIEVER’S BETTER KNOWLEDGE96

The reason why these differences [between the believer and the
unbeliever with respect to the foundation and application of the concepts
of fact, logic, possibility, etc.] do not appear on the surface is that, as a
matter of fact, all men are human beings who were created in the image
of God. Even the non-regenerate therefore have in their sense of deity,
though repressed by them, some remnant of the knowledge of God and
consequently of the true source and meaning of possibility and
probability. It is to this remnant of a truly the-istic interpretation of
experience that Hodge97 really appeals when he speaks of the laws of
belief that God has implanted in human nature. It is, of course, not only
quite legitimate, but absolutely imperative to appeal to the "common
consciousness" of men in this sense. But in order really to appeal to
this "common consciousness" that is repressed by the sinner we must
refuse to speak of a "common consciousness" that is not suppressed by
the sinner.98

The non-regenerate man seeks by all means to "keep under" this

remnant of a true theistic interpretation that lingers in his mind. His real
interpretative principle, now that he is a covenant-breaker, is that of
himself as ultimate and of impersonal laws as ultimate. It is he himself as
ultimate, by means of laws of logic that operate independently of God,
who determines what is possible and probable. To the extent, then, that
he proceeds self-consciously from his own principle of interpretation, he
holds the very existence of God, and of the creation of the universe, to be
not merely improbable, but impossible." In doing so he sins, to be sure,
against his better knowledge. He sins against that which is hidden deep
down in his own consciousness. And it is well that we should appeal to
this fact. But in order to appeal to this fact we must use all caution not to
obscure this fact. And obscure it we do if we speak of the "common
consciousness" of man without distinguishing clearly between what is
hidden deep down in the mind of natural man as the revelation
and knowledge of God within him and what, in rejecting God, he has
virtually adopted as being his final interpretative principle.

3.3 A An Example ofPresuppositional Proof of

Christianity
The presuppositional approach to defending the faith which is summarized
above was once illustrated by Van Til in a short pamphlet aimed at a popular
audience and entitled Why I Believe in God.100 It was not intended to be
philosophically complex in content or overly scholarly in its style. It is
conversational and easy to follow—and devastating in its power (once one
understands the nature of the presuppositional defense pursued there). It offers a
profound and readable illustration of the “transcendental” argument for the truth
of the Christian worldview, but without resorting to calling it that or using other
philosophical parlance.

Later in his life, Van Til wrote a booklet that indicates the chief purpose for
which he had written the various books, syllabi, and pamphlets that were
published during his long career. In it, the very first one of his publications that
he chose to annotate was Why I Believe in God. About it he said: " I was
brought upon the Bible as the Word of God. Can I, now that I have been
to school, still believe in the God of the Bible? Well, can I still believe in
the sun that shone on me when I walked as a boy in wooden shoes in
Groningen? I could believe in nothing else if I did not, as back of
everything, believe in this God. Can I see the beams underneath the floor
on which I walk? I must assume or presuppose that the beams are
underneath. Unless the beams were underneath, I could not walk on the
floor."101 This was Van Til’s homey way of expressing the penetrating truth
declared by the psalmist David: “In thy light shall we see light” (Ps. 36:9).
Unbelievers cannot bring together both order (unity) and change (diversity) in
their reasoning or in their view of reality. They thereby make nonsense of both,
and all arguments against God are intellectually self-defeating. If you cannot
believe in God, then you cannot logically believe in anything else. This is the
subtle message that he drove home in this imaginary dialogue with an
unbeliever.

WHY I BELIEVE IN GOD102

You have noticed, haven't you, that in recent times certain scientists like
Dr. James Jeans and Sir Arthur Eddington, as well as some outstanding
philosophers like Dr. C. E. M. Joad, have had a good deal to say about
religion and God? Scientists Jeans and Eddington are ready to admit that
there may be something to the claims of men who say they have had an
experience of God, while Philosopher Joad says that the "obtrusiveness
of evil" has virtually compelled him to look into the argument for God's
existence afresh. Much like modernist theologian Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr
who talks about original sin, Philosopher Joad speaks about evil as being
ineradicable from the human mind.

Then, too, you have on occasion asked yourself whether death ends all.
You have recalled, perhaps, how Socrates the great Greek philosopher,
struggled with that problem the day before he drank the hemlock cup. Is
there anything at all, you ask yourself, to the idea of a judgment after
death? Am I quite sure, you say, that there is not? How do I know that
there is no God?

In short, as a person of intelligence, having a sense of responsibility, you

have from time to time asked yourself some questions about the
foundation of your thought and action.103 You have looked into, or at
least been concerned about, what the philosophers call your theory of
reality. So when I suggest that you spend a Sunday afternoon with me
discussing my reasons for believing in God, I have the feeling that you
are basically interested in what I am proposing for discussion.

To make our conversation more interesting, let's start by comparing

notes on our past. That will fit in well with our plan, for the debate
concerning heredity and environment is prominent in our day. Perhaps
you think that the only real reason I have for believing in God is the fact
that I was taught to do so in my early days. Of course I don't think that is
really so. I don’t deny that I was taught to believe in God when I was a
child, but I do affirm that since I have grown up I have heard a pretty full
statement of the argument against belief in God. And it is after having
heard that argument that I am more than ever ready to believe in God.
Now, in fact, I feel that the whole of history and civilization would be
unintelligible to me if it were not for my belief in God. So true is this, that I
propose to argue that unless God is back of everything, you cannot find
meaning in anything.1041 cannot even argue for belief in Him, without
already having taken Him for granted. And similarly I contend that you
cannot argue against belief in Him unless you also first take Him
for granted.105 Arguing about God's existence, I hold, is like arguing
about air. You may affirm that air exists, and I that it does not. But as we
debate the point, we are both breathing air all the time. Or to use another
illustration, God is like the emplacement on which must stand the very
guns that are supposed to shoot Him out of existence. However if, after
hearing my story briefly, you still think it is all a matter of heredity and
environment, I shall not disagree too violently. My whole point will be that
there is perfect harmony between my belief as a child and my belief as a
man, simply because God is Himself the environment by which my early
life was directed and my later life made intelligible to myself.106

THE "ACCIDENT OF BIRTH"

We are frequently told that much in our life depends on "the accident of
birth." In ancient time some men were said to spring full-grown from the
foreheads of the gods. That, at any rate, is not true today. Yet I
understand the next best thing happened to you. You were born, I am
told, in Washington, D. C., under the shadow of the White House. Well, I
was born in a little thatched roof house with a cow barn attached, in
Holland. You wore "silver slippers" and I wore wooden shoes.

Is this really important for our purpose? Not particularly, but it is important
that neither of us was born in Guadalcanal or Timbuktu. Both of us, I
mean, were born in the midst and under the influence of "Christian
civilization." We shall limit our discussion, then, to the "God of
Christianity." I believe, while you do not believe or are not sure that you
do believe, in this particular kind of God. That will give point to our
discussion. For surely there is no sense in talking about the existence of
God, without knowing what kind of God it is who may or may not exist.

So much then we have gained. We at least know in general what sort of

God we are going to make the subject for our conversation.107 If now we
can come to a similar preliminary agreement as to the standard or test by
which to prove or disprove God's existence, we can proceed. You, of
course, do not expect me to bring God into the room here so that you
may see Him. If I were able to do that, He would not be the God of
Christianity. All that you expect me to do is to make it reasonable for you
to believe in God. And I should like to respond quickly by saying that that
is just what I am trying to do. But a moment's thought makes me hesitate.
If you really do not believe in God, then you naturally do not believe that
you are his creature. I, on the other hand, who do believe in God also
believe, naturally, that whatever you yourself may think, you really are his
creature. And surely it is reasonable for God's creature to believe in God.
So I can only undertake to show that, even if it does not appear
reasonable to you, it is reasonable for you, to believe in God.108

I see you are getting excited. You feel a little like a man who is about to
undergo a major operation. You realize that if you are to change your
belief about God, you will also have to change your belief about
yourself.109 And you are not quite ready for that. Well, you may leave if
you desire. I certainly do not wish to be impolite. I only thought that as an
intelligent person you would be willing to hear the "other side" of the
question. And after all I am not asking you to agree with what I say. We
have not really agreed on what we mean by God more than in a general
and formal way. So also we need not at this point agree on the standard
or test in more than a general or formal way. You might follow my
argument, just for argument's sake.110

CHILDHOOD
To go on, then, I can recall playing as a child in a sandbox built into a
corner of the hay-barn. From the hay-barn I would go through the cow-
barn to the house. Built into the hay-barn too, but with doors opening into
the cow-barn, was a bed for the working-man. How badly I wanted
permission to sleep in that bed for a night! Permission was finally given.
Freud was still utterly unknown to me, but I had heard about ghosts and
"forerunners of death." That night I heard the cows jingle their chains. I
knew there were cows and that they did a lot of jingling with their chains,
but after a while I was not quite certain that it was only the cows that
made all the noises I heard. Wasn't there someone walking down the
aisle back of the cows, and wasn't he approaching my bed? Already I
had been taught to say my evening prayers. Some of the words of that
prayer were to this effect: "Lord, convert me, that I may be converted."
Unmindful of the paradox, I prayed that prayer that night as I had never
prayed before.

I do not recall speaking either to my father or mother about my distress.

They would have been unable to provide the modern remedy.
Psychology did not come to their library table—not even The Ladies
Home Journal! Yet I know what they would have said. Of course there
were no ghosts, and certainly I should not be afraid anyway, since with
body and soul I belonged to my Saviour who died for me on the Cross
and rose again that His people might be saved from hell and go to
heaven! I should pray earnestly and often that the Holy Spirit might give
me a new heart so that I might truly love God instead of sin and myself.

How do I know that this is the sort of thing they would have told me?
Well, that was the sort of thing they spoke about from time to time. Or
rather, that was the sort of thing that constituted the atmosphere of our
daily life. Ours was not in any sense a pietistic family. There were not any
great emotional outbursts on any occasion that I recall. There was much
ado about making hay in the summer and about caring for the cows and
sheep in the winter, but round about it all there was a deep conditioning
atmosphere. Though there were no tropical showers of revivals, the
relative humidity was always very high. At every meal the whole family
was present. There was a closing as well as an opening prayer, and a
chapter of the Bible was read each time. The Bible was read through
from Genesis to Revelation. At breakfast or at dinner, as the case might
be, we would hear of the New Testament, or of "the children of Gad after
their families, of Zephon and Haggi and Shuni and Ozni, of Eri and Areli."
I do not claim that I always fully understood the meaning of it all. Yet of
the total effect there can be no doubt. The Bible became for me, in all its
parts, in every syllable, the very Word of God. I learned that I must
believe the Scripture story, and that "faith" was a gift of God. What had
happened in the past, and particularly what had happened in the past
in Palestine, was of the greatest moment to me. In short, I was brought
up in what Dr. Joad would call "topographical and temporal
parochialism." I was "conditioned" in the most thorough fashion. I could
not help believing in God—in the God of Christianity—in the God of the
whole Bible!111

Living next to the Library of Congress, you were not so restricted. Your
parents were very much enlightened in their religious views. They read to
you from some Bible of the World instead of from the Bible of Palestine.
No, indeed, you correct me, they did no such thing. They did not want to
trouble you about religious matters in your early days. They sought to
cultivate the "open mind" in their children.

Shall we say then that in my early life I was conditioned to believe in God,
while you were left free to develop your own judgment as you pleased?
But that will hardly do. You know as well as I that every child is
conditioned by its environment. You were as thoroughly conditioned not
to believe in God as I was to believe in God.112 So let us not call each
other names. If you want to say that belief was poured down m throat, I
shall retort by saying that unbelief was poured down your throat. That will
get us set for our argument.
EARLY SCHOOLING

To the argument we must now shortly come. Just another word, however,
about my schooling. That will bring all the factors into the picture.

I was not quite five when somebody—fortunately I cannot recall who—

took me to school. On the first day I was vaccinated and it hurt. I can still
feel it. I had already been to church. I recall that definitely because I
would sometimes wear my nicely polished leather shoes. A formula was
read over me at my baptism which solemnly asserted that I had been
conceived and born in sin, the idea being that my parents, like all men,
had inherited sin from Adam, the first man and the representative of the
human race. The formula further asserted that though thus conditioned
by inescapable sin I was, as a child of the covenant, redeemed in Christ.
And at the ceremony my parents solemnly promised that as soon as I
should be able to understand they would instruct me in all these matters
by all the means at their disposal.

It was in pursuance of this vow that they sent me to a Christian grade

school. In it I learned that my being saved from sin and my belonging to
God made a difference for all that I knew or did. I saw the power of God
in nature and His providence in the course of history. That gave the
proper setting for my salvation, which I had in Christ. In short, the whole
wide world that gradually opened up for me through my schooling was
regarded as operating in its every aspect under the direction of the all-
powerful and all-wise God whose child I was through Christ. I was to
learn to think God's thoughts after him in every field of endeavour.113

Naturally there were fights on the "campus" of the school and I was
engaged in some—though not in all—of them. Wooden shoes were
wonderful weapons of war. Yet we were strictly forbidden to use them,
even for defensive purposes. There were always lectures both by
teachers and by parents on sin and evil in connection with our martial
exploits. This was especially the case when a regiment of us went out to
do battle with the pupils of the public school. The children of the public
school did not like us. They had an extensive vocabulary of vituperation.
Who did we think we were anyway? We were goody goodies—too good
to go to the public school! "There! Take that and like it!" We replied in
kind. Meanwhile our sense of distinction grew by leaps and bounds. We
were told in the evening that we must learn to bear with patience the
ridicule of the “world." Had not the world hated the church, since Cain's
time?

How different your early schooling was! You went to a "neutral” school.
As your parents had done at home, so your teachers now did at school.
They taught you to be “open-minded." God was not brought into
connection with your study of nature or of history. You were trained
without bias all along the line.

Of course, you know better now. You realize that all that was purely
imaginary. To be "without bias" is only to have a particular of bias. The
idea of "neutrality" is simply a colorless suit that covers a negative
attitude toward God. At least it ought to be plain that he who is not for the
God of Christianity is against Him. You see, the God of Christianity
makes such prodigious claims. He says the whole world belongs to Him,
and that you are His creature, and as such are to own up to that fact by
honoring Him whether you eat or drink or do anything else. God says that
you live, as it were, on His estate. And His estate has large ownership
signs placed everywhere, so that he who goes by even at seventy miles
an hour cannot but read them. Every fact in this world, the God of the
Bible claims, has His stamp indelibly engraved upon it. How then could
you be neutral with respect to such a God?114

Do you walk about leisurely on a Fourth of July in Washington wondering

whether the Lincoln Memorial belongs to anyone? Do you look at "Old
Glory" waving from a high flagpole and wonder whether she stands for
anything? Does she require anything of you, born an American citizen as
you are? You would deserve to suffer the fate of the "man without a
country" if as an American you were neutral to America. Well, in a much
deeper sense you deserve to live forever without God if you do not own
and glorify Him as your Creator. You dare not manipulate God's world
and least of all yourself as His image-bearer, for your own final purposes.
When Eve became neutral as between God and the Devil, weighing the
contentions of each as though they were inherently on the face of them of
equal value, she was in reality already on the side of the Devil!

There you go again getting excited once more. Sit down and calm
yourself. You are open-minded and neutral, are you not? And you have
learned to think that any hypothesis has, as a theory of life, an equal right
to be heard with any other, have you not? After all I am only asking you
to see what is involved in the Christian conception of God. If the God of
Christianity exists, the evidence for His existence is abundant and plain
so that it is both unscientific and sinful not to believe in Him.115

When Dr. Joad, for example, says: "The evidence for God is far from
plain," on the ground that if it were plain everybody would believe in
Him, he is begging the question. If the God of Christianity does exist, the
evidence for Him must be plain. And the reason, therefore, why
"everybody" does not believe in Him must be that "everybody" is blinded
by sin.116 Everybody wears colored glasses. You have heard the story of
the valley of the blind. A young man who was out hunting fell over a
precipice into the valley of the blind. There was no escape. The blind
men did not understand him when he spoke of seeing the sun and the
colors of the rainbow, but a fine young lady did understand him when he
spoke the language of love. The father of the girl would not consent to
the marriage of his daughter to a lunatic who spoke so often of things that
did not exist. But the great psychologists of the blind men's university
offered to cure him of his lunacy by sewing up his eyelids. Then, they
assured him, he would be normal like "everybody" else.117 But the
simple seer went on protesting that he did see the sun.

So, as we have our tea, I propose not only to operate on your heart so as
to change your will, but also on your eyes so as to change your outlook.
But wait a minute. No, I do not propose to operate at all. I myself cannot
do anything of the sort. I am just mildly suggesting that you are perhaps
dead, and perhaps blind, leaving you to think the matter over for yourself.
If an operation is to be performed it must be performed by God Himself.
LATER SCHOOLING
Meanwhile let us finish our story. At ten I came to this country and after
some years decided to study for the ministry. This involved preliminary
training at a Christian preparatory school and college. All my teachers
were pledged to teach their subjects from the Christian point of view.
Imagine teaching not only religion but algebra from the Christian point of
view! But it was done. We were told that all facts in all their relations,
numerical as well as others, are what they are because of God's all
comprehensive plan with respect to them.118 Thus the very definitions of
things would not merely be incomplete but basically wrong if God were
left out of the picture. Were we not informed about the views of others?
Did we not hear about evolution and about Immanuel Kant, the great
modern philosopher who had conclusively shown that all the arguments
for the existence of God were invalid? Oh, yes, we heard about all these
things, but there were refutations given and these refutations seemed
adequate to meet the case.119

In the seminaries I attended, namely Calvin, and Princeton before its

reorganization along semi-modernist lines in 1929, the situation was
much the same. So for instance Dr. Robert Dick Wilson used to tell us,
and, as far as we could understand the languages, show us from the
documents, that the "higher critics" had done nothing that should
rightfully damage our childlike faith in the Old Testament as the Word of
God. Similarly Dr. J. Gresham Machen and others made good their claim
that New Testament Christianity is intellectually defensible and that the
Bible is right in its claims. You may judge of their arguments by reading
them for yourself. In short, I heard the story of historic Christianity and the
doctrine of God on which it is built over and over from every angle by
those who believed it and were best able to interpret its meaning.

The telling of this story has helped, I trust, to make the basic question
simple and plain. You know pretty clearly now what sort of God it is of
which I am speaking to you.120 If my God exists it was He who was back
of my parents and teachers. It was He who conditioned all that
conditioned me in my early life. But then it was He also who conditioned
everything that conditioned you in your early life. God, the God of
Christianity, is the All-Conditioner!

As the All-Conditioner, God is the All-Conscious One. A God who is to

control all things must control them "by the counsel of His will." If He
did not do this, He would Himself be conditioned. So then I hold that my
belief in Him and your disbelief in Him are alike meaningless except for
Him.

OBJECTIONS RAISED

By this time you are probably wondering whether I have really ever heard
the objections which are raised against belief in such a God. Well, I think
I have.

I heard them from my teachers who sought to answer them. I also heard
them from teachers who believed they could not be answered. While a
student at Princeton Seminary I attended summer courses in the Chicago
Divinity School. Naturally I heard the modern or liberal view of Scripture
set forth fully there. And after graduation from the seminary I spent two
years at Princeton University for graduate work in philosophy. There the
theories of modern philosophy were both expounded and defended by
very able men. In short I was presented with as full a statement of the
reasons for disbelief as I had been with the reasons for belief. I heard
both sides fully from those who believed what they taught. You have
compelled me to say this by the look on your face. Your very gestures
suggest that you cannot understand how any one acquainted with the
facts and arguments presented by modern science and philosophy can
believe in a God who really created the world, who really directs all things
in the world by a plan to the ends He has in view for them. Well, I am only
one of many who hold to the old faith in full view of what is said by
modern science, modern philosophy, and modern Biblical criticism.

Obviously I cannot enter into a discussion of all the facts and all the
reasons urged against belief in God. There are those who have made the
Old Testament, as there are those who have made the New Testament,
their lifelong study. It is their works you must read for a detailed refutation
of points of Biblical criticism. Others have specialized in physics and
biology. To them I must refer you for a discussion of the many points
connected with such matters as evolution.121 But there is something that
underlies all these discussions. And it is with that something that I now
wish to deal.

You may think I have exposed myself terribly. Instead of talking about
God as something vague and indefinite, after the fashion of the
modernist, the Barthians, and the mystic, a god so empty of content and
remote from experience as to make no demands upon men, I have
loaded down the idea of God with "antiquated" science and
"contradictory" logic. It seems as though I have heaped insult upon injury
by presenting the most objectionable sort of God I could find. It ought to
be very easy for you to prick my bubble. I see you are ready to read over
my head bushels of facts taken from the standard college texts on
physics, biology, anthropology, and psychology, or to crush me with your
sixty-ton tanks taken from Kant's famous book, The Critique of Pure
Reason. But I have been under these hot showers now a good
many times. Before you take the trouble to open the faucet again there is
a preliminary point I want to bring up. I have already referred to it when
we were discussing the matter of test or standard.

The point is this. Not believing in God, we have seen, you do not think
yourself to be God’s creature. And not believing in God you do not think
the universe has been created by God. That is to say, you think of
yourself and the world as just being there. Now if you actually are God's
creature, then your present attitude is very unfair to Him. In that case it is
even an insult to Him. And having insulted God, His displeasure rests
upon you. God and you are not on "speaking terms." And you have very
good reasons for trying to prove that He does not exist. If He does exist,
He will punish you for your disregard of Him. You are therefore wearing
colored glasses. And this determines everything you say about the facts
and reasons for not believing in Him. You have as it were entered upon
God's estate and have had your picnics and hunting parties there without
asking His permission. You have taken the grapes of God's vineyard
without paying Him any rent and you have insulted His representatives
who asked you for it.122

I must make an apology to you at this point. We who believe in God have
not always made this position plain. Often enough we have talked with
you about facts and sound reasons as though we agreed with you on
what these really are. In our arguments for the existence of God we have
frequently assumed that you and we together have an area of knowledge
on which we agree. But we really do not grant that you see any fact in
any dimension of life truly. We really think you have colored glasses on
your nose when you talk about chickens and cows, as well as when you
talk about the life hereafter. We should have told you this more plainly
than we did. But we were really a little ashamed of what would appear to
you as a very odd or extreme position. We were so anxious not to offend
you that we offended our own God.
123 But we dare no longer present
our God to you as smaller or less exacting than He really is. He wants to
be presented as the All-Conditioner, as the emplacement on which even
those who deny Him must stand.124

Now in presenting all your facts and reasons to me, you have assumed
that such a God does not exist. You have taken for granted that you need
no emplacement of any sort outside of yourself. You have assumed the
autonomy of your own experience. Consequently you are unable—that is,
unwilling— to accept as a fact any fact that would challenge your self-
sufficiency. And you are bound to call that contradictory which does not fit
into the reach of your intellectual powers. You remember what old
Procrustus did. If his visitors were too long, he cut off a few slices at each
end; if they were too short, he used the curtain stretcher on them. It is
that sort of thing I feel that you have done with every fact of human
experience. And I am asking you to be critical of this your own most basic
assumption.125 Will you not go into the basement of your own experience
to see what has been gathering there while you were busy here and
there with the surface inspection of life? You may be greatly surprised at
what you find there.
To make my meaning clearer, I shall illustrate what I have said by
pointing out how modern philosophers and scientists handle the facts and
doctrines of Christianity.

Basic to all the facts and doctrines of Christianity and therefore involved
in the belief in God, is the creation doctrine. Now modern philosophers
and scientists as a whole claim that to hold such a doctrine or to believe
in such a fact is to deny our own experience. They mean this not merely
in the sense that no one was there to see it done, but in the more basic
sense that it is logically impossible. They assert that it would break the
fundamental laws of logic.

The current argument against the creation doctrine derives from Kant. It
may fitly be expressed in the words of a more recent philosopher, James
Ward: "If we attempt to conceive of God apart from the world, there is
nothing to lead us on to creation" (Realm of Ends, p. 397). That is to say,
if God is to be connected to the universe at all, he must be subject to its
conditions. Here is the old creation doctrine. It says that God has caused
the world to come into existence. But what do we mean by the word
cause? In our experience it is that which is logically correlative to the
word effect. If you have an effect you must have a cause, and if you have
a cause you must have an effect. If God caused the world, it must
therefore have been because God couldn't help producing an effect. And
so the effect may really be said to be the cause of the cause. Our
experience can therefore allow for no God other than one that
is dependent upon the world as much as the world is dependent upon
Him.

The God of Christianity cannot meet these requirements of the

autonomous man. He claims to be all-sufficient. He claims to have
created the world, not from necessity but from His free will. He claims not
to have changed in Himself when He created the world. His existence
must therefore be said to be impossible, and the creation doctrine must
be said to be an absurdity.

The doctrine of providence is also said to be at variance with experience.

This is but natural. One who rejects creation must logically also reject
providence. If all things are controlled by God's providence, we are told,
there can be nothing new and history is but a puppet dance.

You see then that I might present to you great numbers of facts to prove
the existence of God. I might say that every effect needs a cause. I might
point to the wonderful structure of the eye as evidence of God's purpose
in nature. I might call in the story of mankind through the past to show
that it has been directed and controlled by God. All these evidences
would leave you unaffected. You would simply say that however else we
may explain reality, we cannot bring in God. Cause and purpose, you
keep repeating, are words that we human beings use with respect to
things around us because they seem to act as we ourselves act, but that
is as far as we can go.126

And when the evidence for Christianity proper is presented to you the
procedure is the same. If I point out to you that the prophecies of
Scripture have been fulfilled, you will simply reply that it quite naturally
appears that way to me and to others, but that in reality it is not possible
for any mind to predict the future from the past. If it were, all would again
be fixed and history would be without newness and freedom.

Then if I point to the many miracles, the story is once more the same. To
illustrate this point I quote from the late Dr. William Adams Brown,
an outstanding modernist theologian. "Take any of the miracles of the
past," says Brown, "the virgin birth, the raising of Lazarus, the
resurrection of Jesus Christ. Suppose that you can prove that these
events happened just as they are claimed to have happened. What have
you accomplished? You have shown that our previous view of the limits
of the possible needs to be enlarged; that our former generalizations
were too narrow and need revision; that problems cluster about the origin
of life and its renewal of which we had hitherto been unaware. But the
one thing which you have not shown, which indeed you cannot show, is
that a miracle has happened; for that is to confess that these problems
are inherently insoluble, which cannot be determined until all possible
tests have been made" (God at Work, New York, 1933, p. 169). You see
with what confidence Brown uses this weapon of logical impossibility
against the idea of miracle. Many of the older critics of Scripture
challenged the evidence for miracle at this point or at that. They made as
it were a slow, piece-meal land invasion of the island of Christianity.
Brown, on the other hand, settles the matter at once by a host of Stukas
from the sky. Any pillboxes that he cannot destroy immediately, he will
mop up later. He wants to get rapid control of the whole field first.
And this he does by directly applying the law of non-contradiction. Only
that is possible, says Brown, in effect, which I can show to be logically
related according to my laws of logic. So then if miracles want to have
scientific standing, that is, be recognized as genuine facts, they must sue
for admittance at the port of entry to the mainland of scientific endeavour.
And admission will be given as soon as they submit to the little process of
generalization which deprives them of their uniqueness. Miracles must
take out naturalization papers if they wish to vote in the republic of
science and have any influence there.

Take now the four points I have mentioned—creation, providence,

prophecy and miracle. Together they represent the whole of Christian
theism. Together they include what is involved in the idea of God and
what He has done round about and for us. Many times over and in many
ways the evidence for all these has been presented. But you have an
always available and effective answer at hand.127 It is impossible! It is
impossible! You act like a postmaster who has received a great many
letters addressed in foreign languages. He says he will deliver them as
soon as they are addressed in the King's English by the people who sent
them. Till then they must wait in the dead letter department. Basic to all
the objections the average philosopher and scientist raises against
the evidence for the existence of God is the assertion or the assumption
that to accept such evidence would be to break the rules of logic.

I see you are yawning. Let us stop to eat supper now. For there is one
more point in this connection that I must make. You have no doubt at
some time in your life been to a dentist. A dentist drills a little deeper and
then a little deeper and at last comes to the nerve of the matter.
Now before I drill into the nerve of the matter, I must again make
apologies. The fact that so many people are placed before a full
exposition of the evidence for God's existence and yet do not believe in
Him has greatly discouraged us. We have therefore adopted measures of
despair. Anxious to win your good will, we have again compromised our
God. Noting the fact that men do not see, we have conceded that what
they ought to see is hard to see. In our great concern to win men we
have allowed that the evidence for God's existence is only probably
compelling. And from that fatal confession we have gone one step further
down to the point where we have admitted or virtually admitted that it is
not really compelling at all.128

And so we fall back upon testimony instead of argument. After all, we

say, God is not found at the end of an argument; He is found in our
hearts. So we simply testify to men that once we were dead, and now we
are alive, that once we were blind and that now we see, and give up all
intellectual argument.

Do you suppose that our God approves of this attitude of His followers?

I do not think so. The God who claims to have made all facts and to have
placed His stamp upon them will not grant that there is really some
excuse for those who refuse to see. Besides, such a procedure is self-
defeating. If someone in your hometown of Washington denied that there
were any such thing as a United States Government would you take him
some distance down the Potomac and testify to him that there is? So
your experience and testimony of regeneration would be meaningless
except for the objective truth of the objective facts that are presupposed
by it. A testimony that is not an argument is not a testimony either, just as
an argument that is not a testimony is not even an argument.

Waiving all this for the moment, let us see what the modern psychologist
of religion, who stands on the same foundation with the philosopher, will
do to our testimony. He makes a distinction between the raw datum and
its cause, giving me the raw datum and keeping for himself the
explanation of the cause. Professor James H. Leuba, a great
psychologist of Bryn Mawr, has a procedure that is typical. He says, "The
reality of any given datum—of an immediate experience in the sense in
which the term is used here—may not be impugned: When I feel cold or
warm, sad or gay, discouraged or confident, I am cold, sad, discouraged,
etc., and every argument which might be advanced to prove to me that I
am not cold is, in the nature of the case, preposterous; an immediate
experience may not be controverted; it cannot be wrong." All this seems
on the surface to be very encouraging. The immigrant is hopeful of a
ready and speedy admittance. However, Ellis Island must still be passed.
"But if the raw data of experience are not subject to criticism, the causes
ascribed to them are. If I say that my feeling of cold is due to an
open window, or my state of exultation to a drug, or my renewed courage
to God, my affirmation goes beyond my immediate experience; I have
ascribed a cause to it, and that cause may be the right or the wrong one"
( or Man, New York, 1933, p. 243). And thus the immigrant must wait at
Ellis Island a million years.

That is to say, I as a believer in God through Christ, assert that I am born

again through the Holy Spirit. The psychologist says that is a raw datum
of experience and as such incontrovertible. We do not, he says, deny it.
But it means nothing to us. If you want it to mean something to us you
must ascribe a cause to your experience. We shall then examine the
cause. Was your experience caused by opium or God? You say by God.
Well, that is impossible since as philosophers we have shown that it is
logically contradictory to believe in God. You may come back at any time
when you have changed your mind about the cause of your regeneration.
We shall be glad to have you and welcome you as a citizen of our realm,
if only you take out your naturalization papers!

We seem now to have come to a pretty pass. We agreed at the outset

to tell each other the whole truth. If I have offended you it has been
because I dare not, even in the interest of winning you, offend my God.
And if I have not offended you I have not spoken of my God.129 For
what you have really done in your handling of the evidence for belief in
God, is to set yourself up as God. You have made the reach of your
intellect, the standard of what is possible or not possible. You have
thereby virtually determined that you intend never to meet a fact that
points to God. Facts, to be facts at all—facts, that is, with decent
scientific and philosophic standing—must have your stamp instead of that
of God upon them as their virtual creator.

Of course I realize full well that you do not pretend to create redwood
trees and elephants. But you do virtually assert that redwood trees and
elephants cannot be created by God. You have heard of the man who
never wanted to see or be a purple cow. Well, you have virtually
determined that you never will see or be a created fact. With Sir Arthur
Eddington you say as it were, "What my net can't catch isn't fish."

Nor do I pretend, of course, that once you have been brought face to face
with this condition, you can change your attitude. No more than the
Ethiopian can change his skin or the leopard his spots can you change
your attitude. You have cemented your colored glasses to your face so
firmly that you cannot even take them off when you sleep.130 Freud has
not even had a glimpse of the sinfulness of sin as it controls the human
heart. Only the great Physician through His blood atonement on the
Cross and by the gift of His Spirit can take those colored glasses off and
make you see facts as they are, facts as evidence, as inherently
compelling evidence, for the existence of God.131

It ought to be pretty plain now what sort of God I believe in.132 It is God,
the All-Conditioner. It is the God who created all things, who by His
providence conditioned my youth, making me believe in Him, and who in
my later life by His grace still makes me want to believe in Him. It is the
God who also controlled your youth and so far has apparently not given
you His grace that you might believe in Him.

You may reply to this: "Then what's the use of arguing and reasoning
with me?” Well, there is a great deal of use in it. You see, if you are really
a creature of God, you are always accessible to Him. When Lazarus was
in the tomb he was still accessible to Christ who called him back to life. It
is this on which true preachers depend. The prodigal thought he had
clean escaped from the father's influence. In reality the father controlled
the "far country" to which the prodigal had gone. So it is in reasoning.

True reasoning about God is such as stands upon God as upon the
emplacement that alone gives meaning to any sort of human
argument.133 And such reasoning, we have a right to expect, will be used
of God to break down the one-horse chaise of human autonomy.

But now I see you want to go home. And I do not blame you; the last bus
leaves at twelve. I should like to talk again another time. I invite you to
come to dinner next Sunday. But I have pricked your bubble, so perhaps
you will not come back. And yet perhaps you will. That depends upon the
Father's pleasure.

Deep down in your heart you know very well that what I have said about
you is true.134 You know there is no unity in your life. You want no God
who by His counsel provides for the unity you need. Such a God, you
say, would allow for nothing new. So you provide your own unity. But this
unity must, by your own definition, not kill that which is wholly new.
Therefore it must stand over against the wholly new and never touch it at
all. Thus by your logic you talk about possibles and impossibles, but all
this talk is in the air. By your own standards it can never have anything to
do with reality. Your logic claims to deal with eternal and changeless
matters; and your facts are wholly changing things; and “never the twain
shall meet." So you have made nonsense of your own experience.135
With the prodigal you are at the swine trough, but it may be that, unlike
the prodigal, you will refuse to return to the father's house.

On the other hand, by my belief in God I do have unity in my experience.

Not of course the sort of unity that you want.136 Not a unity that is the
result of my own autonomous determination of what is possible. But a
unity that is higher than mine and prior to mine. On the basis of God's
counsel I can look for facts and find them without destroying them in
advance. On the basis of God's counsel I can be a good physicist, a
good biologist, a good psychologist, or a good philosopher. In all these
fields I use my powers of logical arrangement in order to see as much
order in God's universe as it may be given a creature to see. The unities,
or systems that I make are true because genuine pointers toward the
basic or original unity that is found in the counsel of God.

Looking about me I see both order and disorder in every dimension of

life.137 But I look at both of them in the light of the Great Orderer who is
back of them.138 I need not deny either of them in the interest of optimism
or in the interest of pessimism. I see the strong men of biology searching
diligently through hill and dale to prove that the creation doctrine is not
true with respect to the human body, only to return and admit that the
missing link is missing still. I see the strong men of psychology search
deep and far into the sub-consciousness, child and animal
consciousness, in order to prove that the creation and providence
doctrines are not true with respect to the human soul, only to return and
admit that the gulf between human and animal intelligence is as great as
ever. I see the strong men of logic and scientific methodology search
deep into the transcendental for a validity that will not be swept away by
the ever-changing tide of the wholly new, only to return and say that
they can find no bridge from logic to reality, or from reality to logic. And
yet I find all these, though standing on their heads, reporting much that is
true.1391 need only to turn their reports right side up, making God instead
of man the center of it all, and I have a marvellous display of the facts as
God has intended me to see them.

And if my unity140 is comprehensive enough to include the efforts of

those who reject it, it is large enough even to include that which those
who have been set upright by regeneration cannot see. My unity is that of
a child who walks with its father through the woods. The child is not afraid
because its father knows it all and is capable of handling every situation.
So I readily grant that there are some "difficulties" with respect to belief in
God and His revelation in nature and Scripture that I cannot solve. In fact
there is mystery in every relationship with respect to every fact that faces
me, for the reason that all facts have their final explanation in God,
whose thoughts are higher than my thoughts, and whose ways are higher
than my ways. And it is exactly that sort of God that I need. Without such
a God, without the God of the Bible, the God of authority, the God who is
self-contained and therefore incomprehensible to men, there would be no
reason in anything.141 No human being can explain in the sense of
seeing through all things, but only he who believes in God has the right to
hold that there is an explanation at all.142

So you see when I was young I was conditioned on every side; I could
not help believing in God. Now that I am older I still cannot help believing
in God. I believe in God now because unless I have Him as the All-
Conditioner, life is chaos.143

I shall not convert you at the end of my argument. I think the argument is
sound. I hold that belief in God is not merely as reasonable as other
belief, or even a little or infinitely more probably true than other belief; I
hold rather that unless you believe in God you can logically believe in
nothing else. But since I believe in such a God, a God who has
conditioned you as well as me, I know that you can to your own
satisfaction, by the help of the biologists, the psychologists, the logicians,
and the Bible critics reduce everything I have said this afternoon and
evening to the circular meanderings of a hopeless authoritarian. Well, my
meanderings have, to be sure, been circular; they have made everything
turn on God. So now I shall leave you with Him, and with His mercy.144
Notes for Chapter 3

1. The Defense of the Faith (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1955),

198.

2. Common Grace (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed,

1947), 62.

3. The Protestant Doctrine of Scripture, In Defense of the Faith,

vol. 1 (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1967), 4.

4. An Introduction to Systematic Theology, In Defense of the Faith,

vol. 5 (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1974), 130.

5. Ibid., 163-64.

6. Ibid., 192.

7. Common Grace, 104.

8. The complaint will be heard that, if we are arguing over whether

God exists and has final authority, we may not take that authority for
granted while we are arguing about it. But the complaint is reversible,
is it not? The Christian can reply: “If we are arguing over whether
God exists and has final authority, we may not take for granted that
He is not the final authority; the attempt to authorize (substantiate)
His authority by some other standard would amount to the ruling that
whatever authority He has cannot be final.” A person’s
presuppositions are (as such) presupposed even when someone is
discussing or arguing about them. For example, philosophers who
argue for the truth or validity of the laws of logic do not put aside
logic while arguing for it.

9. The Case for Calvinism (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and

Reformed, 1963), 145.
10. The Reformed Pastor and Modern Thought (Philadelphia:
Presbyterian and Reformed, 1971), 35-36.

11. Introduction to Systematic Theology, 30.

12. Cf. the logical fallacy of reification (or hypostatization): treating

as a concrete or specific entity a series of events (“the winds of
change”) or an abstraction (“the federal government,” “Mother
Nature”).

13. Reason—in the sense of the tool of intellectual analysis

(reasoning)—must indeed be used to read, understand, and believe
what God’s revelation says, and yet the final authority that directs this
reasoning process is God’s revelation itself; moreover, the tool of
reasoning is only intelligible in terms of what God’s revelation
teaches in the first place.

14. Introduction to Systematic Theology, 29, 15.

15. Ibid., 197.

16. Van Til held that even where there was the appearance of
agreement on fundamental points in the reasoning, science, or
philosophy of believer and unbeliever, there was nonetheless and
ultimately a difference between them in both the broader
understanding and the more specific application of those points.

17. Common Grace, 63.

18. Excerpts from Defense of the Faith, 31, 64, 49-52, 309, 158-59,
162-63, 165, 306.

19. Man, in rebellion against God, takes the world and the
relationships therein (between things or events) to be quite intelligible
without making reference to anything that transcends the world or
human experience.

20. In the nature of the case, God is the final authority. But if God’s
authority must be authorized or validated by the authority of human
reasoning and assessment, then human thinking is more authoritative
than God Himself—in which case God would not have final authority,
and indeed would no longer be God. The autonomous man who insists
that God can only be accepted if His word first gains the approval or
agreement of man has determined in advance that God will never be
acknowledged as God (the final authority).

21. CVT: An unpublished class syllabus.

22. CVT: Van Halsema's charge that for me "the metaphysical

situation is of only secondary significance" (Calvin Forum, Dec.
1953, p. 85) is here, as throughout my writings, shown to be
contrary to fact.

23. Thus, the very thing that most unbelievers demand—a neutral
and autonomous investigation of the facts to see whether God’s word
can be recognized as true and authoritative—already precludes the
kind of God of which the Scripture speaks. Apologists need to come
to grips with this, lest their method of defending the faith betray the
object of their faith.

24. Emphasis added. Apologetical argument is directed by one’s

more general theory of knowing (one’s epistemology). Because the
believer and the unbeliever have different ultimate authorities, they of
necessity have ultimately different theories of knowledge. It is
shameful for apologists to pretend otherwise, hoping that unbelievers
will not be conscious of (or come to realize) the conflict in
epistemology that separates them in principle from believers.

25. Van Til is here drawing from “Does the Universe Have a
Mind?” His 8, no. 4 (April 1948): 28-30, in which he answers an
article of the same title by William Pepperell Montague in
the Saturday Review of Literature for September 6, 1947.

26. This refers to one of the perennial problems in philosophy,

which is expressed in various ways. The subject of knowledge—the
knower—thinks in a particular way; the way in which he thinks, even
if it is a matter of logically organizing his beliefs, is internal to his
mind. However, the object of knowledge—what he is thinking about
—is (usually) the world outside his mind. What warrant is there for
assuming that the subject and the object in this knowledge transaction
correspond to each other? In terms of Van Til’s question, why should
unchanging concepts or laws of logic be thought appropriate for
understanding the constandy changing world outside the mind?

27. The self-sufficiency or independence of God refers to the fact

that He needs nothing outside of Himself and is not subject to or
determined by anything outside of Himself; that is, God is “self-
contained.” As such, He is the Creator of all things and the determiner
of all events; everything depends upon Him. “In Him we live and
move and have our existence” (Acts 17:28).

28. In Kant’s philosophy, certain ideas—the ideas of reason—are

not in themselves false, but can be used in an erroneous fashion. If
they are used as though they denoted something that is metaphysical
and yet known by the immanent categories of human reasoning (that
is, used “constitutively”), they lead to illusions. However, if such
ideas are used in a regulative fashion—as “limiting notions”— they
set ideal conditions and curb the extreme application of universal
principles, thereby helping to bring coherence and unity to human
experience. Limiting notions give guidance to human thinking and
knowing; man is to proceed as if there were objects denoted by them.
Such ideas can regulate our thinking, whether or not they correspond
to any transcendent objects.
29. A “pure” fact is a raw and uninterpreted experience (or,
alternatively, the object that is experienced). “Pure” rationality refers
to the categories and unifying principles utilized by the mind in
interpreting experience. In Kant’s philosophy, the mind of man is
active in constituting its objects, not simply a passive receiver of sense
data. So the mind’s pure rationality is “imposed” upon the pure facts.

30. Remember here that Van Til speaks of an “absolutely”

authoritative book—one whose authority is beyond challenge and has
no qualifications or limits. Unbelievers may see the Bible as
enshrining the advanced wisdom of many good men over the ages,
and in that sense may see it as bearing some authority, but never an
authority that in itself establishes what is true and right, no matter
what.

31. “Monistic” refers to the fact that the unregenerate man will not
take account of the Creator-creature distinction when it
comes to thinking and reasoning. The conditions of
knowing are singular, he insists, applying equally to God
and man. For Van Til, however, man’s thinking must
follow after or replicate God’s thinking on the level of a
creature, thus being “analogical” and recognizing two
levels of knowing (original and derivative, absolute and
subordinate).
32. An excerpt from Introduction to Systematic Theology, 134-35.

33. In the process of knowing anything, man begins with his own
experience and questions—the “immediate” starting point. However,
that which man knows metaphysically begins with God (who
preinterprets, creates, and governs everything man could know), and
God’s mind is epistemologically the standard of truth— thus being the
“ultimate” starting point.

34. Case for Calvinism, 115.

35. Protestant Doctrine of Scripture, 103.

36. Introduction to Systematic Theology, 6.

37. Protestant Doctrine of Scripture, 5.

38. Case for Calvinism, 128-29.

39. This does not mean that we can say everything about God
simultaneously with everything else that can be said about God.
Obviously, we can only talk about “one thing at a time.” Nevertheless,
when we talk about the existence or intelligence or power (etc.) of
God, the object of our discussion is specifically or concretely that
Being for whom there is a full Christian conception (in accordance
with His self-revelation in Scripture). There is, for instance, no
abstract divine sovereignty that is not the sovereignty of the covenant-
keeping God of Scripture—any more than there is any divine
covenant that is not enacted by the sovereign God of Scripture.
Whenever the Christian talks about the aspect of covenant or about
the aspect of sovereignty, he always keeps in mind the fuller and
implicitly definitional context of what he is narrowly discussing. The
only omniscient God whom the Christian defends is the one who is
simultaneously omnipotent, omnipresent, etc.

40. “Nature and Scripture,” in The Infallible Word, ed. N. B.

Stonehouse and Paul Wool-ley (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and
Reformed, 1946), 280.

41. Protestant Doctrine of Scripture, 61.

42. Introduction to Systematic Theology, 29.

43. Protestant Doctrine of Scripture, 12, 57.

44. Defense of the Faith, 41, 48-49, 113, 115-16.

45. “Theory of being” is another way of designating one’s theory of

reality (what kinds of things exist, their origin, relationships, etc.),
called “metaphysics.” One’s “theory of knowledge” is his
“epistemology,” involving the nature, limits, methods, and standards
of knowing. For Van Til, one’s epistemology and one’s metaphysics
mutually influence and are adjusted to each other, thus forming a
“network” of presuppositions.

46. That is, the Christian worldview or “system” must be set in

contrast to the non-Christian’s worldview or “system.”

47. The Christian and non-Christian worldviews are divided because

they involve different religions—different ultimate commitments in
life, with different points of reference.

48. Van Til is here speaking of the unbeliever’s methodology—his

understanding or view of the method to use in knowing, interpreting,
or proving things. He has a different theory of method than the
believer. Nevertheless, in actual practice the two of them follow a
procedure or method that will be very similar (e.g., they open their
eyes and look, compare conflicting accounts for inconsistencies, etc.).
Van Til often said that regeneration does not give men different noses,
but it surely changes their understanding and use of their noses!
(Substitute for “noses” the words “brains,” “logic,” etc., to get the
crucial point.)

49. The “point of contact” is something that two opponents have in

common and which, as such, is a point that one person can use to
make contact with the other person and build toward greater
agreement in outlook. If two former basketball players who have now
become businessmen have a dispute over a business arrangement, one
of them might seek to resolve their dispute by first finding a point of
contact in their common, previous experiences as basketball
players. (“Remember how you had to learn to work together on the
court with that teammate you did not personally like, all for the
greater good of putting together a winning season? Well, that is kind
of what we are going to have to do if this snag in our contract is going
to get cleared up.”) What Van Til wanted us to see, however, is that
the believer’s point of contact with the unbeliever—what they have in
common as rational creatures of God who know their Creator—is
something that the unbeliever wants to suppress and deny. (“What do
you mean? I never played basketball”—even though you have his
records, press releases, and on-court pictures in your briefcase.)
Stubbornness in maintaining a dispute sometimes means that the point
of contact becomes a point of confrontation.

50. The “systems” of the natural man represent the philosophies or

worldviews that the unbeliever will openly espouse and attempt to
defend—in contrast to the “sense of deity,” which the unbeliever
attempts to suppress. What Van Til means here is that what the
believer and the unbeliever genuinely have in common— their true
point of contact (the sense of deity)—brings about a confrontation
between their espoused “systems.”

51. Excerpts from Introduction to Systematic Theology, 41, 42.

52. This short paragraph contains two essential components of Van

Til’s presuppositional apologetic: (1) Only the Christian worldview
can provide an intelligible theory of evidence and produce reasoning
on the basis of it. (2) This worldview is known, but suppressed, by the
unbeliever, who attempts (unsuccessfully) to formulate an alternative
worldview to account for reasoning and evidence.

53. The unbeliever insists that God must be subject to the same
conditions as man; so he is “monistic,” rejecting any true
transcendence for God. Thus, if a corpse is resuscitated, it could not
be due to the transcendent action of God, but must simply be an
unusual biological event awaiting explanation. In advance the
unbeliever rules out transcendent explanations, for he is a naturalist in
his espoused presuppositions.

54. Van Til observes: "Every non-Christian has an a priori. And

the a priori of every non-Christian is different, radically different,
from that of the Christian" (Introduction to Systematic
Theology, 115). An “a priori” is something that someone claims can
be known as true (or false) “prior to”—or apart from, or without
reference to—observation or experience.

55. Common Grace, 94-95.

56. Ibid., 50.

57. Introduction to Systematic Theology, 7.

58. Protestant Doctrine of Scripture, 62.

59. Common Grace, 8.

60. Protestant Doctrine of Scripture, 125. Cf. the position espoused

by the ancient Sophists that “man is the measure of all things.”

61. Something is “immanent” if it is near at hand or inherent in

human experience (as opposed to being “transcendent”—originating
beyond or exceeding human experience).

62. Introduction to Systematic Theology, 26.

63. Defense of the Faith, 247-48.

64. If the mind of God does not sovereignly determine the