Apologetics – Page 3 – Anthony G. Flood

Criticism of Presuppositional (Worldview) Apologetics

I welcome it, and recently got some from William Vallicella, Ph.D., a rejoinder to my response to him. Unfortunately for me, however, it’s part of a long series that bears on what I tried to do in Philosophy after Christ, and I haven’t yet been able to give the series’ members the study they deserve.

What I’m focusing on is Bill’s helpful distinction between a rationally acceptable argument and a rationally compelling one. I think my Van Til-inspired transcendental argument can be formulated so that it’s not merely acceptable, but also one that “coerces” rational assent (at least by those who value rational standards). Bill charges me with conflating, if not confusing, epistemic and ontic possibility, a serious matter, one I will confess if I must. How one coordinates one’s metaphysics (which determines ontic possibility) with one’s epistemology has its own presuppositions.[1]

I can “live with” a “merely” rationally acceptable argument that can defeat any candidate, alternative to the Christian worldview, for the status of transcendental condition of intelligible predication, that my interlocutor might suggest. Of course, such serial refutation, however successful for however long, falls short of proof. To be able, however, to pre-emptively rule out the possibility of there being any successful candidate remains for me a desideratum. I’ll let others speculate about what psychological type that confession betrays.

Note

[1] See, e.g., Greg Bahnsen, “The Necessity of Coordinating Epistemology with Metaphysics,” Section 1 of Chapter 3, “Neutrality & Autonomy Relinquished,” Presuppositional Apologetics: Stated and Defended. Joel McDurmon, ed. American Vision Press, 2010. See also Bahnsen’s magisterial exposition of Cornelius Van Til:

Van Til did not address specific disputes between philosophers or contemporary debates regarding possibility, but he realized that Christians are committed to hold certain beliefs about possibility that unbelievers will reject. “It is today more evident than ever before that it is exactly on those most fundamental matters, such as possibility and probability, that there is the greatest difference of opinion between theists and antitheists.” To put it simply and memorably: “Non-believers have false assumptions about their musts.”

Greg L. Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetic: Reading and Analysis. Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing Company, 1998, 281. The internal quotations are from Cornelius Van Til, An Introduction to Systematic Theology. Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing Company, 1974, 36, 264. To the latter footnote Bahnsen appended:

That is, they [antitheists] utilize a false philosophical outlook regarding “necessity,” “possibility,” etc.

Philosophy after Christ: First US Amazon review

From a friend, John Lancaster

A Fascinating Read.

Let me first preface this review by mentioning the following:

I was initially introduced to the author via his blog AnthonyGFlood.com. Coming from an Austrian economics background, I gravitated towards the posts covering political economy, history, civics, and individualism. While I also enjoyed Flood’s work in philosophy and theology, I’m not as well versed in those fields. Even though the quality of his work is uniform across his different ventures, my connection to the formerly mentioned topics was far stronger than my connection to the latter.

That being said, as a Christian and eclectic thinker, I jumped at the chance to read Philosophy After Christ. Having already reviewed [Herbert] Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness, I was looking forward to another insightful, concise, and engaging read.

Insightfulness, conciseness, and engagement are in spades with this book. Don’t let the sub-200 page count fool you, this is not a light read.

Flood argues the Christian worldview as “the only worldview that makes possible what philosophers do . . . [and] that everyone, even those who claim to be anti-Christian, operates implicitly in terms of the Christian worldview.”

He supports this stance through rigorous logical deductions while constantly referencing Scripture. Flood’s ability to sequentially link his chains of logic is truly a masterful display.

Along with unraveling the philosophical components of his claim, Flood sharply addresses opposing arguments from distinguished intellectuals such as Bertrand Russell, Cornelius Van Til, and Gordon Clark.

For anyone looking to bolster their understanding of Christian philosophy, look into different theistic interpretations, or enjoy quality cerebral jousting, this is the perfect read for them.

Thanks, John. I hope it will have successors. That’s up to other readers.

On arguing for one’s “sense of life”: Vallicella, Alain, Rand, and Bahnsen

In “Alain on Monasticism,” a stimulating Substack offering, my friend and philosopher extraordinaire Bill Vallicella (“Maverick Philosopher”) asked about the fruitfulness of arguing for or against a sense of life. The occasion was his recent re-reading of On Happiness by Émile-Auguste Chartier (1868-1951), whose nom de plume was Alain. My interest is not in Alain’s antipathy toward monkish existence but rather in Bill’s (apparent) ambivalence toward mere attitudes that imply (or entail) philosophical claims. Since I’ve probably misunderstood the problem Bill was cornering, I’m hoping that what I’ve written below will move him to set me straight. He writes:

Alain . . . frankly expresses his sense of life or sense of reality. I don’t share it, but can I argue against it? Does it even make sense to try to argue against it? Probably not. In a matter such as this, argument comes too late. Alain feels it in his guts and with his “whole being” that the religion of the mournful monks, the religion Alain himself was raised in, is world-flight and a life-denying sickness.

For a worldling such as Alain, the transient things of this world are as real as it gets, and all else is unreal. The impermanence of things and the brevity of life do not impress or shock him as they do someone with a religious sensibility.

In a Schlitz ad from yesteryear Bill finds this mood summed up:

. . . in the words of a 1970 beer commercial:

You only go around once in life
So you have to grab for all the gusto you can.

He continues:

The worldling’s attitude is a matter of sensibility and it is difficult and probably impossible to argue with anyone’s sensibility. I cannot argue you out of your sense of reality. Arguments come too late for that. In fact, arguments are often little more than articulations on the logical plane of a sensibility deep in the soul that was already in place before one attained explicit logical skills. Continue reading “On arguing for one’s “sense of life”: Vallicella, Alain, Rand, and Bahnsen”

“Presuppositionalism”: a reply to an implicit criticism

In “Christ on the Possibility of Social Order without Christ (Matt. 12:24-6)”, an anonymous blogger led into his polemic against “political presuppositionalism” with a swipe at unnamed advocates of generic “presuppositionalism.”

Presuppositionalism, at least in some of its articulations, is the Christian epistemological and apologetical philosophy according to which knowledge is only possible on the condition of a self-conscious presupposition of the existence of God and the truth of his revealed word. One of the problems with presuppositionalism, at least insofar as it represents a distinct theory, is that it confuses the metaphysical conditions for the possibility of knowledge with the epistemological conditions for the possibility of knowledge. God’s existence and role as first cause may be metaphysically necessary for there to be knowledge, but it doesn’t follow from this that God has therefore made it the case that the presupposition of these truths is necessary to have knowledge. (The Natural Law Libertarian, June 19, 2023)

No, presupposing the worldview is necessary, not to have truth, but in order to give an account of how one has it. Accounting for knowledge is an epistemological task.

Continue reading ““Presuppositionalism”: a reply to an implicit criticism”

“Philosophy after Christ”: James N. Anderson’s review

This morning James N. Anderson, Carl W. McMurray Professor of Theology and Philosophy at Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte and author of What’s Your Worldview?: An Interactive Approach to Life’s Big Questions—see a list of his other publications—alerted me to his review, published today, of my Philosophy after Christ: Thinking God’s Th0ughts after Him. It appears on his blog Analogical Thoughts (a.k.a., προγινώσκω, proginōskō, “to foreknow”; see Romans 8:29). For his praise of the book I am grateful, but for his criticisms, I am indebted to him. Please take this link.

Philosophy after Christ: Thinking God’s Thoughts after Him

Philosophy after Christ: Thinking God’s Thoughts after Him, foreword by David Gordon, Ph.D., went live on Amazon today in hard cover, paperback, and Kindle editions. It will be a day or so before the editions interlink on their respective product pages and the “Look inside!” feature is available on all three. Here’s what you’ll find on them:

“Two things especially struck me . . . . One is the sincerity and passion of [Flood’s] efforts over fifty years to explore various ways of understanding Christian faith. He has at various times looked to Bernard Lonergan and Gordon Clark for guidance, but he has now found a resting place in the presuppositionalism of Cornelius Van Til and Greg Bahnsen. . . . The other . . . is the exceptional learning displayed in it. Tony knows the Bible very well, and he discourses learnedly on the meaning of various Hebrew and Greek words in it. He brings to bear in his discussion a great many of the major Western philosophers, showing a detailed knowledge of their thought. If I am not convinced by Tony’s main thesis . . . I nevertheless commend this acute and erudite book highly.” From the Foreword by David Gordon, PhD, Senior Fellow, Ludwig von Mises Institute

When Christ said we’re to live, not by bread alone, by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God (Matthew 4:4), He didn’t make an exception for philosophers. In Scripture, the philosopher has a cornucopia of divine words to feast upon as eagerly as one who hungers physically devours bread.

To pursue philosophy after Christ the way an artist seeks to emulate the style of a master is to reflect that dependence. The price of denying it is to fall prey to one or another species of foolishness.

In Philosophy after Christ: Thinking God’s Thoughts after Him, Anthony Flood (Christ, Capital & Liberty: A Polemic) explores how “vain deceit after the tradition of men” (Colossians 2:8) has taken captive many philosophers, Christian as well as non-Christian.

To philosophize after Christ is to pursue Christ as the Wisdom of God. This requires learning what He has revealed about Himself, the cosmos, and mankind in Holy Scripture and then regimenting one’s thinking and living accordingly.

It also means internalizing the Bible’s Weltanschauung, our “birthright worldview” as created image-bearers, as the presupposition of intelligible predication, that is, of making sense of things, even our sense-making.

The effort to conform one’s mind to Christ’s can generate a “philosophy of philosophy,” or metaphilosophy, indispensable to the “metapologetics” that undergirds sound Christian apologetics.

In Part 1, Basics, Flood describes philosophizing as the unfolding of implications of the worldview which, with our linguistic capability, we inherit at birth.

Part 2, Dialectics, he explores the oppositions that worldviews generate and shows how non-Christian worldviews can infiltrate even the thinking of Christians, including the Catholic Bernard Lonergan and the Calvinist Gordon Clark.

Part 3, Polemics, discusses several expressions of dialectics:

- John Frame’s Square of Religious Opposition, on which Flood then locates
- David Ramsay Steele’s atheism;
- Flood’s defense of the transcendental argument for God’s existence;
- William Vallicella’s critique of Flood’s metaphilosophy; and
- Two books, one by Evangelicals that’s silent about the worldview approach to defending the Christian faith, the other by Roman Catholics who embrace that approach, but fail to identify its non-Catholic origins.

If one loves the wisdom of God (the only wisdom worth seeking), then Jesus’ words must constitute one’s philosophical “global positioning system.” Philosophy after Christ shows you what that involves.

* * *

Your reaction to this book, critical as well as appreciative, will be welcome.

Otis Q. Sellers’s presupposition and his first sermon’s subject

Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992) was a Bible teacher, not an apologist, although he would defend his faith whenever the occasion demanded it. He presupposed that the Bible was the Word of God in the words of men, but never engaged in the “metapologetics” that vindicates this presupposition against challenges. He left such work to others.[1]

In “The Bible: The Word of God,” the first of his 570 tape-recorded messages (1971-1987), Sellers recalled the occasion of his delivering his first sermon, “about fifty years ago,” he says. As he was ordained a Baptist minister in 1922, I’d date this undated message to 1971, which other evidence suggests is the year he launched his tape recorded “library” series (hence the “TL” series).

In that first sermon Sellers expressed his acceptance, as his epistemological foundation (my word, not his), of the self-representation of the Bible’s human authors as writing under the control of the Holy Spirit, Who safeguarded the original manuscripts from affirming or implying error.[2]

The Holy Spirit not only controlled the writing of the Scriptures, but also has disposed those whom He would enlighten to read them, not merely as the words of men, but as the Word of God.

Continue reading “Otis Q. Sellers’s presupposition and his first sermon’s subject”

No Mere Assertion: The Transcendental Argument for the Christian Worldview (and, Therefore, for the Existence of God)

Have I merely been asserting, gratuitously, the Christian worldview, thereby inviting equally gratuitous denial? When I asked a friend for his opinion of the previous post, “Explanation Unexplained,” he replied:

If there is a weakness in your argument, I’d say that it doesn’t distinguish between ontology and epistemology. That is, suppose the Christian worldview, as you expound it, is correct. Suppose someone fails to accept this worldview. Why should this person accept the view that his refusal is a suppression of a view he really knows to be true, even if in fact this is the case? If the reply is that competing worldviews do not explain how truth and knowledge are possible, then perhaps a counter would be that the Christian worldview does not explain this either, but rather asserts its own exclusive rationality.

I will try to remedy this appearance of weakness by asking about the origin of the rational exigency (demand for reasons) behind the criticism. Where does that come from?

The Diagnosis

The answer to my friend’s question is that although the unbeliever may be psychologically unlikely to admits that he’s suppressing the truth, he must live with the logical consequences of the suppression I diagnose on the warrant of Romans 1:18-20 (ESV).

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress (κατεχόντων, katechonton, “hold down”) the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.

The one who fails to accept this diagnosis is, according to the Apostle Paul, self-deceived. Despite that condition, however, the rejecter relies on principles of intelligible predication that he cannot account for (again, the laws of logic, the regularity of nature, and moral absolutes).

Unless something explains their mutual comportment, however, every utterance floats in a void, a cosmic theater of the absurd, rendering all predications (including “Christian theism is false” and “The Bible is not the word of God”) meaningless.

Continue reading “No Mere Assertion: The Transcendental Argument for the Christian Worldview (and, Therefore, for the Existence of God)”

Explanation Unexplained

Does David Ramsay Steele’s Atheism Explained: From Folly to Philosophy confirm aspects of the Square of Religious Opposition discussed in a previous post? [1] In this one I’ll defend an affirmative answer.

This square is an aid to thinking about worldviews according to the epistemic authority they presuppose (if not acknowledge) and what it governs, that is, their principles of transcendence and imminence, unity and diversity.

The Square of Religious Opposition

Christian

Non-Christian

Transcendence:

1. Absoluteness

2. Control

3. Universals

4. Unity

5. Law

Quadrant II:

God’s Has Revealed Himself Concretely in His Word and Works

(Christian “rationalism”)

Quadrant I:

The Human Mind Can Know Everything—Reality Is Exhaustively Cognizable

(Antitheistic rationalism)

Immanence:

1. Relativity

2. Freedom

3. Particulars

4. Diversity

5. Randomness

Quadrant III:

God Is the Sovereign Creator

(Christian “irrationalism” — which makes human reasoning possible)

Quadrant IV:

The Human Mind Is Limited—Nobody Can Know for Sure

(Antitheistic irrationalism)

Each of Steele’s many arguments calls for an apologetic response from a specialist.[2] The table of contents lists many topics and rhetorical tacks.[3] None of them holds up, however, if nothing is holding Steele up. And nothing does.

To show this, I’ve chosen one section of Steele’s book, “God Must Be Subject to Natural Law.” In those few lines he gives the game away, the game being the sport he believes he’s making of Christian theism. But first a few matters by way of background.

According to Steele, either one believes in the God of the Bible (hereafter “God”) or one doesn’t. He happens not to, and so he declares himself an atheist. Thinking no reason for believing is sound, he ends his book by speculating about sociological and psychological causes for the persistence of the allegedly groundless belief. Thus, “atheism explained.” I will not survey his survey.

It is, in any case, incomplete. Steele claims to have started his explanatory enterprise by eliminating “extreme positions”[4] before considering less radical ones. He never, however, deals with arguably the most extreme of them all, namely, that human knowledge of God is innate and requires no justification. The very condition of justification is in need of none. If there is a debate, it is over identifying that condition.

Human beings can unethically suppress that innate knowledge, however, and profess atheism, which is what Steele does. The biblical worldview holds that every human being capable of forming beliefs (a) knows that God exists and (b) is responsible for that knowledge (John 1:19, Romans 1:18). [5] His or her profession of atheism is irrelevant to this issue as is the profession of theism.

Steele writes from within an undeclared worldview, one that rules out the Bible’s in advance. That’s unfortunate, for it’s the only one that makes possible the critique and theoretical justification he’s engaged in. It’s the only one revealed by perfect intelligence (Psalm 147:5, אֵ֣ין מִסְפָּֽר׃, ayin mispar). In the same world cognitive norms comport with absolute moral values, numbers, logical laws, natural regularity, and interpersonal communication and many other otherwise incommensurable realities. They cohere in the Biblical worldview at the center of which is a sovereign creator-God. I can show that they cannot cohere in Steele’s. Continue reading “Explanation Unexplained”

The Square of Religious Opposition: A Van Tillian insight, diagrammed by Frame, taught by Bahnsen, paraphrased by me

“Van Til observed that both the unbeliever and the believer maintain correlative views of continuity (rationalism) and discontinuity (irrationalism), and that these two sets of correlative views stand in contradiction to each other. . . . The Christian holds that God knows and controls all things (resulting in rationality and continuity), which contradicts the non-Christian’s view that reality is an expression of pure chance (resulting in irrationality and discontinuity). The Christian holds that God must reveal Himself and does so with authority over man’s reasoning (stressing discontinuity and ‘irrationality’ or man’s rational inadequacy), which contradicts the non-Christian’s view that reality is controlled and (in principle) completely knowable by the laws of his own mind (stressing rationality and continuity).

“John Frame has often capitalized on this significant insight in Van Til. . . . It is found in ‘the square of religious opposition’ in his The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing Co., 1987), 14-15. . . .” Greg Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetic: Readings and Analysis, 399-400, n. 267.

A long excerpt from Frame’s The Doctrine of the Christian Life (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing Co., 2008) is freely available online; his exposition of the square of religious opposition is in chapter 4, 42ff. What follows is my rendering (part transcription, part paraphrase, done at least ten years ago) of Greg L. Bahnsen’s interpretation of Frame’s idea. My source is Bahnsen’s lecture “Disarming Worldviews” in his Loving God with Your Whole Mind series GB1413. (Clicking the link will take you to a file you may play or download.)

* * *

There’s an antithesis between the Christian worldview and the non-Christian worldview, but at least they have being worldviews in common. Every worldview incorporates considerations of transcendence and elements of immanence.

A worldview’s elements of transcendence are the absolutes, authority, and universals it depends on, all of which are prior to experience. They are the controls that provide unity, continuity, and order for experience.

1. What is absolute is not part of transient experience, but renders the latter intelligible and therefore must transcend that person-relative, changing, and qualified experience.
2. Every appeal to authority relativizes momentary thinking. If I claim to live according to a principle, then that principle, and not any thought that happens to cross my mind, functions as an authority for me. That standard, external to my mind and not a product of it, is that to which my thinking must conform.
3. No philosopher looks upon the world as a realm of utter diversity, so it must notice “commonalities” and employ universals to refer to those commonalities in order to conceive and talk about the diversity he or she does find. When we analyze the reality presented in our experience, we use universals that necessarily transcend the experience to be analyzed.

By contrast, immanence is about the here-and-now, the close-at-hand, what is continuous with our experience. It stresses the concrete details over the abstract plan. Every philosophy deals not only in authority and control measures, but also in the freedom we have to change, make our own decisions, to be different. Continue reading “The Square of Religious Opposition: A Van Tillian insight, diagrammed by Frame, taught by Bahnsen, paraphrased by me”