Wintery Knight on Van Til

Wintery Knight has done a post critical of Van Tilian apologetics:

http://winteryknight.wordpress.com/2012/07/15/cornelius-van-til-and-presuppositional-apologetics/

I’ll just make a few observations. Wintry Knight has one of the best Christian blogs around–even if he is a hellbound Arminian evidentialist. Okay, just kidding.

i) Van Til was a pioneer. But you can’t just judge the fortunes of Van Tilian apologetics by the preliminary formulations of the pioneer. That’s a kind of trial run or rough draft. It’s better to judge the approach by later adherents who refine the formulations.

For instance, when I evaluate Arminianism, I don’t confine myself to Arminius or John Wesley. In fact, I don’t think that’s the best place to start. It makes more sense to begin with contemporary Arminians like I. Howard Marshall and Jerry Walls. Assess the most mature, most astute version of Arminian theology.

IMO, the best contemporary spokesman for Van Tilian apologetics is James Anderson. On occasion, Anderson also teams up with Greg Welty.

ii) Van Til considers the unbeliever from two different aspects. On the one hand there’s the “ideal” unbeliever. The consistent unbeliever. An unbeliever to carries his unbelief to its logical extreme. Mind you, the attempt to be a logically consistent unbeliever generates various inconsistencies, for he’s cutting against the grain of reality.

On the other hand, common grace generally makes the unbeliever more reasonable than he’d otherwise be.

In principle, believers and unbelievers don’t agree on anything, but in practice, there is common ground. At the ontological level, there’s total common ground, for the unbeliever is actually living in God’s world. That’s the reality.

At an epistemological level, there’s some common ground, although that varies from one unbeliever to the next.

iii) William Lane Craig is one of Wintery Knight’s heroes. Yet in his debate with Bart Ehrman, Craig doesn’t confine himself to presenting the evidence. Rather, he has to clear the ground before he can present the evidence.

That’s because Ehrman’s historiography is committed to methodological naturalism. You can’t throw historical evidence at Ehrman if, according to his methodological naturalism, your ostensible evidence doesn’t count as real evidence in the first place.

So before Craig can present his evidence, he has to challenge Ehrman’s presuppositions. He must justify his evidence. For instance:

But that’s not all. Dr. Ehrman just assumes that the probability of the resurrection on our background knowledge [Pr(R/B)] is very low. But here, I think, he’s confused. What, after all, is the resurrection hypothesis? It’s the hypothesis that Jesus rose supernaturally from the dead. It is not the hypothesis that Jesus rose naturally from the dead. That Jesus rose naturally from the dead is fantastically improbable. But I see no reason whatsoever to think that it is improbable that God raised Jesus from the dead.

In order to show that that hypothesis is improbable, you’d have to show that God’s existence is improbable. But Dr. Ehrman says that the historian cannot say anything about God. Therefore, he cannot say that God’s existence is improbable. But if he can’t say that, neither can he say that the resurrection of Jesus is improbable. So Dr. Ehrman’s position is literally self-refuting.

http://www.reasonablefaith.org/is-there-historical-evidence-for-the-resurrection-of-jesus-the-craig-ehrman#section_3

Even though Craig is a well-known critic of Van Tilian apologetics, he’s practicing presuppositional apologetics in response to Ehrman.

Likewise, in his monograph on The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach, Licona devotes extensive attention to the presuppositional issues. He takes a step back from evidentiary appeals to examine underlying methods and assumptions.

And any philosophically astute defense of the Resurrection will have to go beyond direct appeals to testimonial evidence to consider the antecedent credibility of miracles.

iv) Is Van Tilian methodology viciously circular? That fails to appreciate the nature of a transcendental argument. For instance:

As standardly conceived, transcendental arguments are taken to be distinctive in involving a certain sort of claim, namely that X is a necessary condition for the possibility of Y—where then, given that Y is the case, it logically follows that X must be the case too. Moreover, because these arguments are generally used to respond to skeptics who take our knowledge claims to be problematic, the Y in question is then normally taken to be some fact about us or our mental life which the skeptic can be expected to accept without question (e.g., that we have experiences, or make certain judgements, or perform certain actions, or have certain capacities, and so on), where X is then something the skeptic doubts or denies (e.g., the existence of the external world, or of the necessary causal relation between events, or of other minds, or the force of moral reasons). In this way, it is hoped, skepticism can be overturned using transcendental arguments that embody such transcendental claims.

Because of their anti-skeptical ambitions, transcendental arguments must begin from a starting point that the skeptic can be expected to accept, the necessary condition of which is then said to be something that the skeptic doubts or denies. This will then mean that such arguments are ineffective against very radical forms of skepticism, which doubt the laws of logic, and/or which refuse to accept any starting point as uncontentious; and it will also mean that they may be effective against a skeptic who is prepared to accept some starting point, but then ineffective against another skeptic who is not. But neither of these features of transcendental arguments need be felt to be disabling: for the skepticism of the radical skeptics is perhaps of dubious coherence, or at least of little interest because they seem so unwilling to engage with us, while the second limitation may mean merely that different transcendental arguments are required for different skeptical audiences.

 http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/transcendental-arguments/

It’s not fallacious to argue for a truth from the same truth if the truth in question is “some fact about us or our mental life which the skeptic can be expected to accept without question.”

a) Given that fact, you can argue from that unquestionable fact to the necessary preconditions that make it possible.

b) Or, if the necessity or factuality of the fact is challenged, then you first argue for the necessity or factuality of that fact, then argue for the necessary conditions that make it possible.

If the unbeliever grants the fact, you can proceed directly to a theistic argument for the preconditions of the fact.

If the unbeliever denies the fact, you can argue that his denial is ultimately incoherent. 

v) Is presuppositionalism unscriptural? Take Paul’s leading question to Agrippa in Acts 26:8: “Why is it thought incredible by any of you that God raises the dead?”

That’s presuppositional. That’s not a direct appeal to evidence for the Resurrection. Rather, that anticipates an objection to the evidence. That goes behind the evidence to consider prior probabilities. That places the evidence in a theistic framework–biblical theism.

And surely the existence of God is the fundamental presupposition of Scripture. Not just some generic deity, either, but the God who reveals himself in Biblical history.

vi) Is evidentialism scriptural?

a) The NT routinely deploys the argument from prophecy. By contrast, Craig doesn’t use the argument from prophecy in his minimal facts approach.

b) Craig appeals to scholarly consensus. The Bible does not.

c) Craig appeals to the hypothetical source underlying the gospel of Mark, rather than appealing directly to Mark’s Gospel in itself.

d) Evidentialists treat the Resurrection as a “hypothesis.” But the Bible doesn’t treat the Resurrection as the best hypothesis to account for the evidence.

BTW, I’m not necessarily criticizing Craig’s apologetic strategy. I’m just pointing out that it’s equivocal to infer that if evidentialists (e.g. Craig, Habermas, Licona) and NT speakers/writers both make the Resurrection central to their apologetic, then the evidentialists are modeling their apologetic on the example of Scripture. Typically, the leading evidentialists don’t argue for the Resurrection in the same way as Scripture does.