A Catholic Challenge to Modern Atheism is the subtitle of Patrick Madrid and Kenneth Hensley‘s 2010 The Godless Delusion. I applaud their popular presentation of the presuppositional approach to Christian apologetics in the course of taking down contemporary atheists like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and many others. They rack these naturalistic bowling pins and knock them down, with strike after strike. Readers can cull a rich bibliography from the reference notes.
But what is distinctively Catholic about their challenge to atheism?
Granted, Madrid and Hensley are Catholics. So are some (but not all) of the authors they cite in illustration of their arguments. Paragraphs of The Catechism of the Catholic Church are cited on many of the book’s pages. But, unlike virtually every other book by Madrid, it’s not a primer of Catholic apologetics, that is, a case for joining the Roman Catholic communion.
They argue that the Christian worldview alone makes sense of our sense-making. But that approach to apologetics has been a Protestant, largely Reformed (Calvinist), enterprise for more than a century. Madrid and Hensley do not make that clear.
Catholics should, of course, feel free to adopt this approach, as distinct from the traditional approach that starts with theistic proofs, moves on to the historical reliability of New Testament documents, and through the divinity of Jesus, the commissioning of apostles, etc. To my knowledge, Catholics jeopardize no Catholic distinctive by asking his atheistic interlocutor for the ground on which he’s standing when he attacks Christianity.
Even the force of a reductio ad absurdum—which our authors claim is “an important logical tool in your apologetics toolbox” (40)—presupposes that the world is completely intelligible and therefore cannot harbor an absurdity. But if the world were absurd, then the reductio would have no argumentative purchase (and neither would this “if-then” inference of mine).
You know that the world does not harbor an absurdity (and thus reductiones ad absurdum are effective in debate) because you already know (Romans 1:18-20) that God, who knows everything about everything (Psalm 147:5), created it and sustains it. Whether this implicitly denies “the natural light of human reason”[1] rather than expresses it, Madrid and Hensley do not say. They manage to avoid dealing with this issue, even though they cite Romans 1 (37).
The Apostle Paul says by inspiration that God’s existence is clearly seen (kathorao) by the things that are made. Not rationally inferred from them.
I see (I do not rationally infer) that there is a world that exists independently of me, populated with persons other than myself. (I do not infer your personal existence as the best explanation of your bodily behavior. I intuit it.) Philosophers may infer a world populated with other persons, but they do so from premises that are not better known than that world.
Likewise, philosophers may, by “the natural light of human reason,” infer the existence of God from things less well known. They may even do so soundly, but if they do they also do so redundantly. The existence of the God of the Bible is in back (or under the floorboards) of every proof, including a theistic proof. (As I wrote in the linked post, “God, the cosmos, and a plurality of minds other than one’s own are in the same epistemological boat.”)
Marc Ayers learned presuppositionalist apologetics at the feet of Greg Bahnsen at Westminster Theological Seminary. After leaving this Reformed theological seminary Ayers joined the Catholic Church. He tells his story here. Michael Vlach, a dispensationalist, believes in the future restoration of Israel, a doctrine Calvinists reject. But, giving credit where credit’s due, he’s enthusiastic about the approach to defending the Christian worldview that Calvinists, whether one likes it or not, developed. He’s interviewed here.
There is, however, not one mention of Cornelius Van Til (1895-1987) in Madrid and Hensley.
What about Greg Bahnsen (1948-1995)? On page 157 I found, “Here’s how one Protestant author describes the atheist’s situation,” followed by a few sentences by Bahnsen. They’re helpful, but misleadingly light, unrepresentative of the creative mind behind them. When he was alive he was the most prolific exponent, after Van Til, of the method Madrid and Hensley are promoting. Yet Bahnsen’s name does not appear in the body text of the book.
To those few sentences a superscripted reference number (71) is attached, inviting me to turn to page 241 where I found:
Greg L. Bahnsen, in a taped lecture on apologetics.
That’s it. No identification is given beyond “one Protestant author.” Neither is the talk’s date nor title. It’s as though, in a 21st-century cosmology textbook, one were to quote “one English physicist” in the book’s body text, while burying in an endnote a mention of Stephen Hawking and some unnamed book he wrote in the 1990s.
Bahnsen, the author of the monumental Van Til’s Ap0logetics: Reading and Analysis, recorded thousands of lectures—including debates with atheists in which he demonstrated presuppositionalism. (The audio of his legendary 1985 debate with atheist Gordon Stein is available on YouTube.) They’re cataloged and available for purchase, not as “tapes” but as MP3 files, here.
It’s hard to see how one can integrally promote presuppositionalism to a Catholic audience while failing to give its “grandfather” and his chief interpreter their due.
Are Madrid and Hensley unaware of the origins of their apologetic method? Or are they reluctant to draw undue attention to its Protestant source?
If reluctant, why cite Bahnsen at all? Or quote from non-presuppositionalist Protestant apologists J. P. Moreland and Dallas Willard in their “Catholic challenge”?
If, as Catholics, Madrid and Hensley wish to continue to share the Protestant gift of presuppositionalist apologetics, I hope they’ll foreground the matter of the “natural light of human reason” in a future edition of The Godless Delusion. For they leave uncertain its relationship to the method they champion in their book.
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[1] “If anyone shall say that the One True God, our Creator and Lord, cannot be certainly known by the natural light of human reason through created things; let him be anathema. Dei Filius. Canon II:1
