This post continues a series on Christianity and intelligibility (Parts I, II, and III) which focuses on Bill Vallicella’s criticisms of presuppositionalism, the position I share with (albeit at a great distance from) Greg L. Bahnsen and his teacher, Cornelius Van Til, whose distinctive approach to Christian apologetics Bill has been studying.[1]
As I’ve been arguing here (and in Philosophy after Christ), unless one presupposes the Bible’s worldview, one’s thinking—including the thinking informing the post under review and the counterexamples Bill adduces in it—reduces to absurdity. Why? Because non-Christian thinking is groundless—it floats in a void—and if it displays any cogency, it’s because it surreptitiously borrows from the biblical worldview.
Recently, Bill posted “Assuming that God exists, could the atheist’s denial of God be reasonable? His affirmative answer contrasts with Bahnsen and Van Til’s denial. He highlights a sentence of Bahnsen’s from a footnote to his exposition of Van Til’s approach to rationality and the defense of the Christian faith:
Yet it should be clear even to the atheist that if the Christian God exists, it is ‘reasonable’ to believe in him.[2]
For Bill, this is nonsense:
This is the exact opposite of clear. Atheists believe that there is no God, and thus that the Christian God does not exist, and the philosophically sophisticated among them have argued against the reasonableness of believing that the Christian God exists using both ‘logical’ and ‘probabilistic’ arguments. So how could it be clear even to the atheist that if the Christian God exists, it is reasonable to believe that God exists? Bahnsen’s claim makes no sense. It makes no sense to say to an atheist who sincerely thinks that he has either proven, or rendered probable, the nonexistence of God that it is nonetheless reasonable for him to believe that God exists even if in fact, and unbeknownst to the atheist, God does exist.
When it comes to S ascertaining P’s truth value, however, S’s “sincerity” about whether or how well he performed his rational duty or cognitive obligations is irrelevant.[3] S could know P to be true without being willing to believe it.
He could be so dead set against believing P—because it offends something in him, say, his autonomy (or rather, his presumption of it vis-à-vis God), his view of his place in the kosmos—that only God can remove his spiritual blinders. That is, only God can raise him epistemologically from the dead. The epistemologically dead has no epistemic grounds for deploying either “logical” or “probabilistic” arguments for or against anything, including God.
Apart from divine intervention, S will not admit that his denial of P has anything but the purest of motives but will conjure up a rationale for his denial. Let’s have more of Bahnsen’s footnote before us:
Presuppositionalism recognizes that the atheist (and agnostic) have one conception of what amounts to a “reasonable” belief, while the Christian theist has another conception of reasonableness. Yet it should be clear even to the atheist that if the Christian God exists, it is ‘reasonable’ to believe in Him. Thus, Van Til wrote that it may not appear reasonable to the unbeliever to believe in God, even though (given the Christian worldview) it would still be reasonable for the unbeliever to believe. The debate ultimately involves the proper standard of reasonableness.[4]
Theoretically, the atheist, without prejudice to his atheism, can (and ought to) grasp intelligently and affirm rationally God’s existence as the unique explanation of how he knows anything. In other words, he can entertain and affirm presuppositionalism; he can see how intelligible predication depends on God (shorthand for “the biblical worldview”). It would be reasonable for him to do so because its denial leaves his rational exigency (the interiorly felt demands of reason, e.g., don’t be arbitrary, avoid fallacies, etc.) floating in a void.
Practically, however, the atheist won’t affirm any such incriminating description of his epistemological situation, and for the reasons the Bible gives, all of them psychological (that is, issuing from the unbeliever’s spiritually dead ψυχἠ (psyche): he suppresses unrighteously the truth of God’s existence and power. The job of the Christian apologist, however, is not to fallaciously “psychologize” the atheist’s denial but to rebut any intellectual excuse he may make. Assessing the atheist’s sincerity is irrelevant to performing this duty to rebut.
Until I know who’s arguing what, however, I regard reference to “the philosophically sophisticated among them [who] have argued against the reasonableness of believing that the Christian God exists” as “hand-waving” (dismissal without reason) on Bill’s part (only in this context). There is a global argument against any form of non-Christian worldview, but no adherent thereof likes being lumped in with the others. I think they have to be “done in” serially.[5]
In Romans 1:20 (KJV) Paul writes that those who suppress the truth in unrighteousness are “without excuse,” which translates Paul’s ἀναπολογήτους (anapologētous): the unbeliever is literally without an apologetic or defense. Bill seems to think Paul was wrong, that the atheist can resort to any number of defenses of their denial and that’s because (apparently) for Bill, Paul was just another all-too-human thinker, not someone who wrote divinely inspired Scripture (θεόπνευστος, theopneustos; 2 Timothy 3:16) as he was carried by the Holy Spirit (2 Peter 1:21, 3:16).
Bill’s insinuation that sincerity is germane “loads” subsequent reasoning in favor of the non-Christian worldview without doing anything to save it from the absurdity to which I claim it is doomed. His conceit (unfortunately shared by some theists) is that it’s “reasonable” to presuppose that the created order is a neutral playing field on which one can evaluate arguments for and against God. The presuppositionalist denies that conceit: no one could intelligently grasp anything about the world and reasonably test that grasp were not every square inch of it stamped “created.” Since Bill professes theism, I wonder how can he look at it any other way? How can he “bracket” (if he does) createdness?
Bill’s defense of the “sincere” atheist is too abstract for his purposes: there’s no way to test either the atheist’s sincerity or the knowledge claims based on which he deems Christianity “unreasonable.” Again, different professing atheists make different claims. It’s their denial of the Christian worldview that renders them all suspect.
The “sincere atheist’s” posture toward the world and its created status is that he, the human thinker, is the ultimate epistemological authority—and that it couldn’t be otherwise. It’s our epistemological situation: not even God can overcome this barrier. The atheist and his unwitting theist allies rule the biblical worldview out of court from the start just because it denies that presumption of epistemological neutrality.
To state, as Bill does, that the existence of God is “unbeknownst to the atheist” is (unsurprisingly) to interpret the antithesis between us so as to favor his thesis, the presumption of autonomy over the submission to theonomy, his word over God’s. Following Paul (Romans 1:20), Bahnsen and Van Til hold that God has made His existence and power clear to all, but they sinfully suppress that truth (Romans 1:19) unless God cures them of this noetic effect of sin.
Bahnsen [Bill writes] is missing something very important: although truth is absolute, reasonableness is relative. This is why an atheist can find it unreasonable to believe that the Christian God exists even if it is true that the Christian God exists.
How we reason, however, conditions our ability to grasp, not only the undeniability of absolute truth (which Bill affirms) but also the rational affirmability of any particular truth (e.g., “The God of the Bible exists”). The former offers no assurance of the latter. For S presuming his autonomy, there’s always an escape hatch: P may be absolutely true but never passes S’s standards of reasonableness. God may exist, but His existence may never appear reasonable to S even though S theoretically could see that the affirmation of P is rationally demanded of him.
Bill highlights the difference between the absolute (that is, non-person-relative) nature of truth and the person-relative nature of rational acceptability. Depending on his argumentative purpose, Bill stresses one or the other. And so, yes, “[w]hat is true may or may not be reasonable [to believe], and what is reasonable [to believe] may or not be true,” but relativity (or set) theory (with their physical, geographical, historical, and social variables) is not knowing that one is a creature of God.
Ontologically, all created image-bearers are in the same epistemological boat: no matter where or when they live, they all know God and are responsible for that knowledge. Bill seems to think there’s a good analogy between the variable acceptability of theories of physis (from Aristotle to Einstein) and the rational acceptability of the proposition that we are created image-bearers (from Adam and Eve’s day to the present). But E = mc2 doesn’t threaten man’s presumption of autonomy, and so rational acceptability is not relative simpliciter.
Bahnsen’s Van Tillian point was that unless one starts with God, one’s thinking—including the thinking involved in Bill’s examples—reduces to absurdity. I would like to hear Bill on that. His concept of how rational acceptability is historically variable can become a barrier to accepting the truth. Bill grants that “both truth and reasonableness (rational acceptability) are absolute . . . . but only for God, only from God’s point of view.”
And apparently, not even He can overcome that limitation. That is, God cannot infallibly communicate truth to a created image-bearer who is psychologically resistant to it. For
God every truth, being a known truth, is in accordance with divine reason, and everything in accordance with divine reason is true. But we do not occupy the divine point of view. To put it sarcastically, only a ‘presupper’ does.
At least the ‘presupper” doesn’t handicap God as He executes His decree to create the spacetime manifold, to put it sarcastically, such that he can’t ensure that we know certain things, “innately,” as it were.
But of course, neither we nor the presuppositionalists occupy the divine point of view. They only think they do. But that conceit is the whole essence of presuppositionalism, is it not?
No, its essence is that God has infallibly communicated his being and power (Romans 1:20) to all creatures capable of forming an idea of them and that unless one presupposes this, one cannot coherently predicate anything about anything (metaphysically, epistemologically, ethically, aesthetically, etc.). As I answered Bill in Philosophy after Christ: “That’s the heart of Van Til’s transcendental argument: at the very inception of predication (vocal or silent), you’re on God’s turf, not neutral ground.”[6]
Bill’s primary philosophical mission is, he says, to seek the truth, but conditioning it is his determination not to let stand the conceit that knowing the truth is a gift of God, for such a conceit is incompatible with the “independent thinking” he values:
. . . only by thinking for yourself will you find an authority worthy of your submission. If you deem it worthy, then you ought to submit; equally, however, it must prove to you that it deserves your freely tendered submission. You are not nothing, and it is not everything. But you are indigent by all measures. You need it more than it needs you. But only you can decide whether it is an ameliorative absolute, or an idol.[7]
It lies in the very nature of things, Bill seems to imply, that you cannot help but be the ultimate authority, not even to decide who is worthy of your submission. God could not infallibly impress upon prelapsarian Adam’s mind the truth that He is the ultimate authority: it was still up to Adam to decide that He was. C. S. Lewis’s metaphor, which I’m sure is familiar to Bill, is germane:
The ancient man approached God (or even the gods) as the accused person approaches his judge. For the modern man the roles are reversed. He is the judge: God is in the dock. He is quite a kindly judge: if God should have a reasonable defense for being the god who permits war, poverty, and disease, he is ready to listen to it. The trial may even end in God’s acquittal. But the important thing is that man is on the bench and God in the dock.[8]
Paul says God’s being and power, though invisible qualities (ἀόρατα, aorata) are clearly seen (καθορᾶται, kathoratai) in things He has made (Romans 1:20). Atheists deny this unrighteously (ἐν ἀδικίᾳ, en adikia; Romans 1:18), which negates the worth of the “sincerity” Bill imputes to some of them.
Bahnsen’s presupposition was and mine is that Paul wrote as he was carried along by God’s Spirit: his words were therefore as sound as God’s. If Bill denies this, then the god he believes exists is not Paul’s.
To be continued
Notes
[1] Originally, I had intended that this member of the series be about the nature of evidence (in response to Bill’s April 21st post) but the topic of atheistic sincerity, which crops up from time to time in Bill’s criticisms, commanded my attention.
[2] Greg L. Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetic: Readings and Analysis, P & R Publishing, 1998, 124n108; Bill’s emphasis.
[3] The quip, “If you can fake sincerity, you’ve got it made,” alluded to in this post’s title, is attributed to George Burns. For a history of this quotation and its variants, see “The Main Thing Is Honesty. If You Can Fake That, You’ve Got It Made,” The Quote Investigator, December 5, 2011.
[4] Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetic, 123-124n108. My emphasis.—A.G.F.
[5] See, for example, Anthony Flood, “The Transcendental Argument for the Existence of God Revisited: Toward a Response to Bill Vallicella,” October 31, 2023. Bill rejects my argument and diagnoses my interest in it as expressing a need for doxastic security.
[6] Anthony Flood, “William Vallicella on Cornelius Van Til,” Chapter 14 of
Philosophy after Christ: Thinking God’s Thoughts after Him, Amazon, 2022, 134.
[7] William F. Vallicella, “On Independent Thinking,” Philosophy in Progress, March 11, 2023. Emphasis in the original.
[8] C. S. Lewis, “God in the Dock,” Part II, Chapter 12 of God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper, William B. Eerdman’s, 1970, 288.