Sorting out presuppositionalism

The silly contest between Josh Rasmussen and SyeTenB demonstrates, once again, the need to do some sorting:

Regarding the YouTube interview:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zkcs-31PqFg&feature=youtu.be

There are at least three different things flying under the banner of "presuppositionalism"

1. There's the position of SyeTenB. He's a hack with a rabid internet following among a clique of pop Calvinist groupies.

2. That's not to be confused with academic versions of presuppositionalism. For instance:

Greg Welty, “The Conceptualist Argument,” in Colin Ruloff (ed.), Contemporary Arguments in Natural Theology (Bloomsbury Press, forthcoming).

https://www.proginosko.com/docs/The_Lord_of_Non-Contradiction.pdf

https://blog.epsociety.org/2013/09/responses-to-argument-for-god-from-logic.html

3. From another angle is the presuppositionalism of Vern Poythress. For instance:

https://frame-poythress.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/ChancePoythress.pdf

4. There are roughly two competing schools of thought that call themselves presuppositionalists:

i) One derives from Cornelius Van Til. Second-generation Van Tilians include John Frame, the late Greg Bahnsen, and Vern Poythress. We might classify James Anderson as a third-generation Van Tilian. 

However, he's been exposed to some other influences, like Plantinga and modal metaphysics.

Theistic conceptual realism belongs to a family of transcendental arguments. It's interesting how that's evolved. Kant's argument is more epistemological, in part because he doesn't have a robust theology to ground it. Kant might even be a closet atheist. And he's skeptical regarding our knowledge of the external world. So he can't say much of anything to back it up in terms of bedrock ontology. 

Although Van Til's version is partly epistemological, he tries to ground it in the metaphysics of Reformed theism.

Greg Welty and James Anderson have done a lot to embed the epistemological side of the argument in modal metaphysics. I think it's a transcendental argument with an epistemological side, but they've done more to model and detail the necessary metaphysical conditions that make it possible. 

ii) The other derives from the late Gordon Clark. Clark as an anti-empiricist. 

Clark's followers make second-order knowledge necessary for first-order knowledge. You don't know anything unless you know how you know it. They make the justification of knowledge a necessary ingredient in knowledge itself. Here are two examples:

http://unapologetica.blogspot.com/2019/11/gordon-clark-and-necessity-of.html

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2006/03/more-scripturalist-mumbo-jumbo.html

It's important to keep these two schools of thought separate, even though they both use the same designation. When you're accused of not understanding presuppositionalism, part of the problem is that there are competing schools of thought as well as different exponents with varying views.

I don't think Josh is under any obligation to understand SyeTenB's positionbecause  there's not much there there. 

Aphantasia

A friend drew my attention to this:

https://www.livescience.com/61183-what-is-aphantasia.html

Has a percentage of the population always suffered from this deficit? I wonder if the younger generation's exposure to so much artificial sensory stimulation prevents the brain or mind/brain interface from developing the capacity to form mental images without an external stimulus, or retain imagery without continuous reinforcement. 

I recall reading something about Gordon Clark which indicates that he may have suffered from aphantasia. If so, that might be one reason he preferred abstractions and propositions to sense knowledge. He didn't have a normal experience of mental imagery. 

Sye-Clones

I was asked to comment on a video by YouTube atheist "Ozymandias Ramses II" (or "Ozy" for short). I'm not going to watch hours of his videos. I think the popularity of podcasts and YouTube videos is intellectually lazy. A cumbersome way to expound and analyze complex issues. 

However, in response to commenters, Ozy sometimes provides lengthy explanations in writing. I will therefore assess some of his written statements. 

From what I can tell, his primary target is Sye Ten Bruggencate and his minions. Another target is Bible Thumping Wingnut (which I never view).  Secondary targets may include objectivism (Ayn Rand) and Scripturalism (Gordon Clark and his would-be disciples). Let's begin with some background information:

I live in Canada.  I studied psychology, Western intellectual history, and then  philosophy in Montreal (McGill and Concordia), and pursued (never completing) a doctorate in philosophy at UWO in London, Ontario. 

With respect to your question about foundationalism and Quine/Neurath, I'm in the latter camp.  In fact in some of the shows/hangouts I've challenged the foundationalist/edifice metaphor that informs presuppositionalism in favour of Quine's web of belief and Neurath's raft metaphors with respect to knowledge.  In fact, the approach to epistemology I find most promising is Quine's project of naturalized epistemology.  I did grad work in that area, specifically on the psychology of belief-acquisition and the enabling assumptions (aka properly basic beliefs) that constitute the main timbers within one's raft of belief (or the most well-integrated strands within one's web of beliefs).

I reject the Justified, true belief (JTB) definition of knowledge for a variety of reasons, but my principle objection is that I don't think justification is properly part of the definition of knowledge.

Justification is necessary in life and serves pragmatic purposes, being important for persuasion and for satisfying the conditions of public assertability, but it's not an ingredient in what makes a belief into knowledge. I embrace an externalist account of epistemic justification and repudiate the internalist account of justification as being a pre-theoretical intuition that doesn't stand up to scrutiny and which leads unavoidably to the problem of justificatory regress.   Instead of JTB, I define knowledge as 'reliably-produced true belief' which is how some philosophers define it who are working towards Quine's project of naturalized epistemology.  

So that's where he's coming from. He's an atheist. I've been told he's an ex-Jehoveh's Witness. Unfortunately, many former cult members are suspicious of religion generally. 

It is condition of reasonableness and rationality that one's confidence in one's belief in any proposition should scale with or be commensurate with the quantity and quality of evidence in support of that proposition.  Belief isn't all or none; it admits of degrees of confidence. 

True, although we frequently have more evidence for a given belief than we are conscious of. 

Certainty may be a psychological desideratum, but it's not a necessitatum.  Some  presuppositionalists (of the Sye-Clone variety) seem to make a fetish of the idea of certainty, but contra their intuitions and desires on the matter, certainty is not a requirement for knowledge. And if they think certainty is a requirement on knowledge, well....that needs to be argued for.  It's a tough argument to make.

Depends on what we mean by certainty:

i) Certainty in the psychological sense of certitude isn't equivalent to knowledge

ii) Knowledge isn't equivalent to proof. 

So, can we be certain of anything? In my view, yes, but that's a heavily qualified 'yes'.  To say that some proposition is a certitude is merely to say that within the scope of a set of  assumptions, some claims can be put forth as certainties.  But that's not the absolute, unconditional certainty that a presuppositionalist lusts after.  That kind of certainty is  what I call 'hysterical certainty'. It's illusory.

Apparently, that makes Ozy is a global skeptic. But global skepticism is self-refuting (see below). 

Regarding Bahnsen, I'm not sure what point you were making by mentioning his saying that his opponents lose just by showing up. Of course he thinks that. He's a presuppositionalist: He thinks that anyone who uses reason at all is borrowing from his worldview and so has tacitly admitted defeat by showing up for a debate.  That's part of their apologetic.  Did you think that the more sophisticated presuppers didn't apply presuppositionalism?  Did you think they were going to provide evidence to support their belief in god? That'd make them evidentialists, not presuppers.  Their proof (so-called) proceeds by transcendental argument - an alleged demonstration of the impossibilty (due to incoherence) of all other worldviews.

The problem with this entire argument is that you utilized your reasoning in the very act of defending the reliability of your reasoning. This is a manifestly circular argument.  If your brain wasn't functioning properly, if your memory was compromised in the very act of evaluating the premises in your argument, if logic was not valid, then you'd have no reason to trust your conclusions.  So, you're exactly where you started; you're assuming the very thing you were asked to defend and prove to be the case - namely that your cognitive capacities and the inferential processes you relied upon are reliable.   There is no way out of this problem.

The presuppositionalist is simply requiring the impossible: He or she is demanding that you defend rationality, but will only accept a rational argument.  Well, one can't have one's reason and eat it too.  That's what needs to be pointed out - that one is being asked to do the impossible. The mistake people are making here is to set out on the fool's errand of trying to use one's cognitive capacities and inferential practices (eg: deductive reasoning)  to show that those cognitive capacities and inferential practices are reliable.  One is simply being challenged to do the impossible.  One should never waste one's time trying to do the impossible. One should instead point out that the challenge betrays a confusion on the part of the challenger.  Tell them to show you how they do it. Ask them to put up or shut up. And the moment the presuppositionalist starts with his presuppositional argument and invokes his god as the guarantor of his own inferential practices and cognitive capacities, just point out that he seems to have used his cognitive capacities and inferential processes to reach his conclusion that he can trust his inferential capacities and inferential processes and thus, has argued in a circle and thus has assumed their reliability in the very act of trying to establish their reliability...and so has failed at the challenge they have set out for us.

And the same problem holds for inferential reasoning and for the reliability of our perceptual capacities.  These properly basic beliefs are the enabling assumptions that make possible the testing of all our other beliefs about reality, but their reliability cannot be confirmed because we have to utilize them in the very act of evaluating the outcomes which result from acting upon them.  They are, in that sense, pre-rational beliefs we are all naturally disposed to believe and by means of which we can formulate and develop ever-improving models of reality. 

1) When using the primacy or existence argument - or any argument at all - one is implicitly assuming that inferential process one is using is reliable and can be trusted to yield true conclusions when the very conclusion one is supposed to be demonstrating is that one's inferential processes being used are reliable and can be trusted to yield true conclusions.  Why, after all, would you use an inferential process to prove anything unless you assumed its proper application yields true conclusions?

2) When using the primacy or existence argument - or any argument at all - one is implicitly assuming that one's own cognitive capacities, in that very act of cognition, are reliable and not malfunctioninng and so can be trusted to yield true conclusions when the very conclusion one is supposed to be demonstrating is that one's cognitive capacities are reliable and properly functioning. Why, after all, would you employ or rely upon a cognitive faculty process to prove anything unless you assumed it was reliable and properly functioning when you were relying it?

Hence that argument, and any such argument, is circular.  The reason it feels like a trick is because we don't have any other way of arriving at reasonable conclusions and we're so accustomed to the use of inferential processes and our cognitive faculties that we assume that any conclusion can be supported by such means - but the rationality and reliability of reason and our cognitive faculties is one conclusion which we cannot support in this way, except on pain of circular argumentation.

All circular arguments are junk. There are no virtuous circular arguments. 

There are two basic problems with Ozy's objection:

1. He fails to distinguish between a circular argument/syllogism and circular reasoning. 

i) In a circular argument, as I understand it, the conclusion repeats the major premise without the minor premise(s) contributing any additional reasons. Put another way, the difference between an assertion and an argument is that an argument provides reasons in support of a truth-claim. 

A circular argument is a technical fallacy of a logical syllogism. It renders the syllogism invalid. 

In a valid argument, the major and minor premises combine to yield the conclusion. There's a logical interrelationship between the premises which yield a conclusion over and above the force of each individual premise, separately considered. In that event, the conclusion isn't reducible to the major premise. Rather, the combination of premises mark an advance over the major premise, or any single premise, considered in isolation to the whole. 

ii) By contrast, circular reasoning is broader than formal syllogistic argumentation. Every argument takes some things for granted. There's a distinction between presuppositions and premises. Presuppositions are not a part of the argument proper, but underlie the argument. It's not fallacious in the formal logical sense to engage in circular reasoning, where you take certain things for granted, that fall outside the scope of the syllogism (e.g. the external world). 

If the presuppositions are in dispute, then it begs the question to take them for granted, but if they're reasonable, inevitable, or shared by both sides, it's not question-begging to take them for granted.

2. His objection is self-refuting. He contends that demonstrating rationality is impossible because the proponent must assume and utilize inferential reasoning in the very act of defending the reliability of his cognitive abilities and inferential processes. But notice that Ozy must rely on his own cognitive abilities and inferential processes to argue that you can't rely on your cognitive abilities and inferential processes to justify human reason! So he himself simultaneously depends on what he denies. He can't rely on reason show that the reliability of reason is indemonstrable, for that shoots a hole in his boat. If true, it's false; therefore it's false. 

We do not have any way - no test - by means of which we can rule out the possibility of solipsism. Think about that fact you were not taught or told there was a mind-independent reality. It's not a conclusion you reached. Rather, you have never doubted it, just as our pets assume, pre-theoretically and without any process of inference, that the world exists outside of them.  We learn what was IN the world, not that there IS a world.  Any putative test or evidence you could put forward as a potential demonstration of the veracity of this assumption is perfectly compatible with it all happening in your mind without an external reality.  So, you  have not reasoned your way to the conclusion that there's a mind-independent reality, you've just always assumed it.  And it's not an intuition either.  It's a pre-rational assumption that we make by virtue of the sorts of organism that we are.

i) One of the problems with Quine's naturalized epistemology is the status of logic. If logic is reducible to human psychology, to how humans think, then logic is descriptive rather than normative. What makes anything illogical? What makes your inference fallacious rather than mine if there's no intersubjectival standard of comparison, if there's nothing over and above how humans reason? On that view, logic is just an inductive generalization of human psychology. What makes one sample superior to another? Indeed, Quine denied logical necessity. 

According to solipsism, my disembodied mind is the only thing that exists. The "physical world" is a hallucination, a mental projection of my consciousness. 

But that means logic is just a product of my contingent mental states. In that event, we can rule out the possibility of solipsism because it nullifies logical necessity. On that view, you can't even affirm or deny solipsism because the law of identity requires logical necessity. 

ii) If the physical, empirical world is an illusion, why do I imagine a physical empirical world? Consider dreams. Dreams simulate a physical empirical world because our dream state is parasitic on our waking state. But if there was no physical world to experience, why would that be the content of our imagination? 

iii) If I'm the only mind, a disembodied mind, why don't I have a memory of an infinite past? Didn't I always exist? 

iv) Do I cease to exist when I'm unconscious (e.g. a dreamless sleep)?

As Ozy concedes:

With respect to "solipsistic dreamscapes", no one is actually a solipsist. These nightmare scenarios are thought-experiments which serve to shed light on certain concepts by presenting idealized or limiting cases. They help us map out the landscape of possibilities. They are not offered up as plausible outlooks to be embraced.

Yet he seems to deploy that thought-experiment to warrant universal fallibilism. But I think we can rule out solipsism (see above). 

You also invoke transitivity of definition at point 5, but it's worth noting that the logical property of transivitity is a basic principle in logic and can't be derived without assuming transivitity itself. Logic can't be defended using logic without arguing in a circle.

It's true that logic isn't directly justifiable. Yet he himself relies on logic to deride the possibility of absolute certainty about anything. So he keeps shooting a hole in his boat. 

So, the moral of the story here is not that we can't trust our memories and other cognitive capacities or that properly basic beliefs are "arbitrary", "intuitions", or "mystical".  Rather, it's that, at bottom, rationality is the tool we use, the ladder we climb, to reach conclusions and justify them, but rationality is composed, constituted, out of universally-shared assumptions which are indispensible and which, unfortunately, can't be used to justify themselves.  This shouldn't surprise us.  Evolution by natural selection furnished us with the sorts of minds we need to survive in the world, but it wasn't trying to make us into epistemic angels who can guarantee that our assumptive dispositions are correct.  Mother Nature gave us what will work.  She didn't supply us with any guarantees.  And that's another reason why the quest for certainty is a fool's errand.  

Notice how his argument is only as good as the truth of naturalistic evolution and evolutionary psychology. He temporarily abandons his radical skepticism to affirm naturalistic evolution, but then uses that to sabotage human reason. Once again, he shoots a hole in the bottom of his boat. 

Doubt (to crib a line from Wittgenstein) comes after certainty (the feeling of deep conviction). We presuppose a lot - a whole lot - before we can ever muster a doubt about anything. This is because we do not enter the world as blank slates who are disposed to doubt and don't adopt beliefs until we have reasons and evidence. Rather, we enter the world like other mammals, filled with behavioral and doxastic dispositions, that is, pre-rational assumptions, which are sometimes described as 'properly basic beliefs' by philosophers and cognitive scientists. Among those dispositions are ones to trust our memories, senses, inferential practices and whatever we're told by our epistemic and linguistic communities as we are growing up.

Thus, we are not born as skeptics who learn to believe. We are born credulists who learn to doubt. Doubt happens within the scope of pre-rational properly basic beliefs. And so it is only within the scope of what we already believe and take for granted that specific doubts can arise, be expressed, and explored in the hopes of confirming them or assuaging them. So, could I be wrong about any particular belief within my belief set? Yes. There is no particular belief within my belief set that's immune to the possibility of error.

To be mistaken demands a standard of comparison. False beliefs can't be the criteria for other false beliefs. So either some human beliefs are immune to the possibility of error or all of God's beliefs are immune to the possibility of error, which is what makes the contrast between truth and error coherent in the first place.  

Your objection is a highly intuitive one, but here's why it's question-begging.  When you begin with axioms and then set out to evaluate the feasibility of those axioms by means of an evaluation of the desirability or undesirability of the outcomes resulting from your actions, your evaluation of the desirability or undesirability of the outcomes will rest on a host of properly basic beliefs.  Your very ability to recognize an outcome as desirable or undesirability at all requires that you assume, in the very act of evaluating what it happening around you, that:

1) there's a a world around you in which things are actually happening.

2) You will be assuming that you exist, as an agent in that world, and you will only be able to notice what consequences arise from your decisions on the assumption that

3) your perceptual capacities are properly functioning and tracking reality. Further, your ability to reach any conclusions based upon these perceptual experiences of what's resulted from your decisions and actions will rest upon the presumed

4) reliability of your memory.  

Just ask yourself, how could you get as far as testing some hypothesis or some axiom's veracity if you couldn't even trust that you were remembering which axiom you were testing or which axiom you'd begun with when you made your decision.  Further, if you didn't trust in your

5) inferential practices such as induction and deduction,

you would have no reason at all to trust your own conclusions.  

Pragmatism is a marvelous and indispensable thing, as is hypothesis-testing of axioms, but it's only possible within the scope of certain assumption that certain facts are already in place and certain capacities we have are reliable.  Without assuming those first, we can't evaluate the efficacy of any axioms.  So, yes, one can start posit axioms and we can evaluate them, but the evaluation of the feasibility of those axioms presupposes a host of beliefs about us, the world, and the reliability of our cognitive capacities.  In short, axiomatic reasoning and evaluation rests upon properly basic beliefs.

i) That may be a legitimate objection against the backwoods Scripturalism of John Robbins and his minions. 

ii) However, the fact that certain assumptions are unavoidable in human reasoning is not an argument for skepticism. Rather, that's a launchpad for transcendental reasoning:

Transcendental arguments are partly non-empirical, often anti-skeptical arguments focusing on necessary enabling conditions either of coherent experience or the possession or employment of some kind of knowledge or cognitive ability, where the opponent is not in a position to question the fact of this experience, knowledge, or cognitive ability, and where the revealed preconditions include what the opponent questions. Such arguments take as a premise some obvious fact about our mental life—such as some aspect of our knowledge, our experience, our beliefs, or our cognitive abilities—and add a claim that some other state of affairs is a necessary condition of the first one. Transcendental arguments most commonly have been deployed against a position denying the knowability of some extra-mental proposition, such as the existence of other minds or a material world. Thus these arguments characteristically center on a claim that, for some extra-mental proposition P, the indisputable truth of some general proposition Q about our mental life requires that P.

https://www.iep.utm.edu/trans-ar/

Induction and universal generalizations

According to Gordon Clark, induction is a fallacy. To take a stock example, if I see a 1000 black crows, that fails to justify the inference that all crows are black, because the 1001st crow might be white.

But there are some problems with that objection:

i) To begin with, is a white crow a crow, or is it a related species? Two different, closely related species. 

ii) Let's take a different comparison. Suppose I've only seen white rabbits. But that's because I've only seen rabbits in winter. If I saw rabbits in summer, I'd see brown rabbits.

So it would be invalid to infer that all rabbits are white. That's an unrepresentative sample, based on seasonal variations.

Yet once we take seasonal variations into account, then the reason to believe rabbits must either be white or brown is deeper than observing a sample of rabbits. Rather, that involves the principle of camouflage. 

In that event, I wouldn't believe that rabbits are white in winter just because every rabbit I've seen in winter is white. Rather, their pigmentation would be grounded in a principle that's not dependent on counting instances of rabbits.

iii) Take another example: Suppose a 15C American Indian has noticed that solar eclipses only happen at a new moon whereas lunar eclipses only happen at a full moon. What is more, everyone in his tribe has made the same observation. His parents and grandparents have made the same observation. And according to Indian lore, handed down from one generation to the next, that's always been the case. Of course, that, in itself, is insufficient to justify a universal generalization. 

Suppose, by contrast, you ask an astronomer. His reason wouldn't be based on repeated observations. Rather, he'd provide an underlying explanation for that observation, based on the relative position of the sun, moon, and earth during solar and lunar eclipses. 

A similar example would be the observation that the sun always rises in the east and sets in the west. If all you have to go by is observation, then, in principle, the sun could reverse course. But an astronomer has a differ explanation, based on the earth's counterclockwise rotation. 

Scientists observe regularities in nature. But that's just a starting-point. Their belief in the "uniformity of nature" isn't merely based on sampling natural phenomena. Rather, they attempt to go behind the phenomena to discover a mechanism that causes that effect. Therefore, it's simplistic to say inductive logic is fallacious, as if "natural laws" are merely based on repeated observations. 

iv) In addition, exceptions wouldn't invalidate the principle, because natural laws have ceteris paribus clauses. An exception is due to the introduction or interference of an overriding cause. 

Normally, water can't travel uphill. That generalization isn't simply based on the common observation that water normally travels downhill. Rather, it's grounded in the absence of some additional factor to counteract the force of gravity. But sometimes there are natural factors (e.g. storm surge) or technological factors (e.g. water pumps) that exert a countervailing influence. 

In that respect, a white crow is not a real exception to the principle, inasmuch as the generalization is implicitly qualified. All things being equal, all panthers are black, all ravens are black, &c.

Albinism is a genetic condition that produces a different pigmentation. But the generalization allows for differential factors. 

In sum, if a Scripturalist is going to attack the principle of induction, he will need to attack the principle of causation that underlies many scientific explanations. 

Rationalists and mystery-mongers

Recently, I had some exchanges on Facebook regarding presuppositionalism:

1. Jonathan McLatchie

What is the trouble with the presuppositionalist school of apologetics? The presuppositionalist argues that Christianity is the only self-consistent worldview, and thus on that basis one is rationally warranted in taking it to be axiomatic -- thus, the presuppositionalist argues, it is impossible that Christianity is false because no other worldview is self-consistent. My beef with this view is at least two fold. First, coherence is not the only test of truth (indeed, there are many propositions which are self-consistent and yet false). There is also the correspondence test for truth -- in other words, does the proposition correspond to reality? Second, while I think a decent argument can be marshalled for asserting that theistic belief is axiomatic to the presumption of the rational intelligibility of the Universe, and indeed reason itself, it is not at all clear to me that the same is true of belief in the Bible as God's revealed Word. I fail to see any logical contradiction that is entailed by asserting that the Biblical worldview is false. That is why, in my opinion, evidentialism is far more satisfying as an apologetic approach.

Hays

Several distinctions are in order:

i) There's a difference between Clarkian presuppositionalism and Van Tilian presuppositionalism. Clark and Van Till represent opposing extremes. Clark is a rationalist while Van Til is a mystery-monger. I think Clark's rationalism is sometimes simplistic while Van Til is often gratuitously paradoxical. 

Clark's epistemology is more Augustinian while Van Til's epistemology is more like a Reformed version of transcendental Thomism. 

ii) The Clarkian version is axiomatic and espouses the coherence theory of truth.

One problem is that Gordon Clark had no real successors. There are some efforts to improve on his approach. To my knowledge, Ryan Hedrick is the most promising candidate to develop Clarkian presuppositionalism. But that remains at a programmatic stage.

ii) Van Til was a big picture thinker who didn't excel at detailed formulations. And he's binary to a fault.

Van Til's two leading, immediate successors were Greg Bahnsen and John Frame, both of whom diverge from Van Til in some respects.

iii) At present, the most astute Van Tililian apologist is probably James N. Anderson, although Vern Poythress also does some really find work in apologetics.

iv) The "logical contradiction that's entailed by asserting that the Biblical worldview is false" is the claim that God himself is the source and standard of logic and human rationality. 

2. Suppose we take the crudest version of evidentialism, which would be akin to historical positivism. "Just the facts!"

Now when an evidentialist of that stripe tries to proves Christianity by appeal to the basic reliability of the Gospels, a halfway intelligent atheist will invoke Hume's argument for the presumption against miracles. Typically, an atheist will say that any naturalistic explanation, however implausible, is more plausible than a supernatural explanation.

That's why sophisticated evidentialists like Swinburne and the McGrews present a philosophical justification for the possibility and credibility of miracles. They do so to lay the groundwork for evidentialism. 

By the same token, a key issue in the debate over ID theory is whether methodological atheism is a sine qua non of true scientific explanation. That's why Stephen Meyer and Bill Dembski, as well as sympathetic referees like Plantinga and Del Ratzsch, criticize methodological atheism. 

Likewise, secularism is unable to justify induction and inductive logic. Or the first instance. 

By contrast, as James Anderson pointed out some years ago, a doctrine of providentially preserved natural kind is able to ground induction. 

On a related note are cliches about value-laden nature of observation, and the realist/antirealist debate over the philosophy of science.

These are examples of presuppositional issues in apologetics and related disciplines. So this is a crucial area in which evidential apologetics and Van Tilian apologetics overlap.

vi) That said, there's no doubt that much of the best work in contemporary Christian apologetic is hailing from the evidentialist camp.

3. Actually, the hardest things to prove can be obvious or fundamental things. That's because we use obvious or fundamental things to prove less obvious or less fundamental things. But once we hit bedrock, it's hard to directly prove what's intellectually bedrock. At that point the most promising line of argument is transcendental reasoning.

There are certain beliefs we don't normally attempt prove, such as the existence of other minds, an external world, or sense knowledge. And it's difficult, if not impossible, to prove them directly. Rather, we use these them to prove other things. And, in a roundabout way, that's the best way to prove these beliefs. We can't do without them. To deny them means to deny too many other things.  Belief in God often operates at the same fundamental level. 

Mind you, there can be more direct lines of evidence for God (e.g. miracles, answered prayer). 

To take an example, W. V. Quine was the top secular philosopher of his generation. Labored to formulate a systematically naturalistic epistemology and ontology.

He started out as a mathematician. His initial reputation derived from his work on mathematical logic. However, as a consistent atheist, he denied logical necessity. That didn't fit into physicalism. He did admit to being a "reluctant platonist" to accommodate the higher ranges of set theory.

So, from a secular perspective, what is logic? Is logic just how human brains think (assuming brains do the thinking)? If so, what's the standard of comparison? What makes one brain logical and another brain illogical? If logic isn't independent of brains, then what's the basis for saying someone used a logical fallacy? Logic is nothing over and above how brains operate. Whose brain is the benchmark? 

By contrast, Christian philosophers like Greg Welty and James Anderson have argued that abstract objects like logic are constituted by the infinite, timeless mind of God. That grounds logic in a way that naturalism/physicalism cannot.

4. Regarding Josh Parikh's infinite regress objection to Sye's brand of presuppositionalism, I think part of the problem may be Sye's equivocal, slipshod terminology about "making sense of X". Suppose we recast the issue using epistemic justification lingo. Suppose we then draw the following distinction. A belief can be justified in two different senses:

i) A person's state of belief may be justified or justifiable

ii) Providing a philosophical justification for a belief

If we're using "justified" in the sense of (ii), and if someone must presuppose Christian theism in that sense to be justified (="make sense of"), then that may well generate Josh's infinite regress. You can never get started if you must provide a preliminary philosophical justification for everything you say or believe. For every claim you make will then be unjustified absent a prior justification. In other words, if you're providing a justification for X, but the justification you provide requires a justification in its own right. I think that's the kind of regress that Josh is angling t. 

One way to sidestep that deadlock is appeal to (i). We can begin in a state of justified belief. That psychological state may in turn be amenable to philosophical justification, so we can take it a step further. A justified belief in the sense of (i) can be subject to additional analysis and philosophical justification. To have a justified belief in the sense of (i) is the starting-point for having a justified belief in the sense of (ii). 

So, for instance, a young child is justified in the sense of (i) in believing that he knows his mother by sight and his mother loves him. 

And in principle, that might be justifiable in the sense of (ii) through corroborative evidence. 

By analogy, unbelievers can hold many justified beliefs in the sense of (i) even if their atheism implicitly undermines those beliefs. Given atheism, they can't justify their beliefs in the sense of (ii), even though some of their beliefs are justified or justifiable in the sense of (i).

Josh may or may not agree with me, but it's an attempt to disambiguate the issue.

i) One issue is that you have different religious epistemologies which intersect with different apologetic methodologies. although the fit is sometimes adventitious.

For instance, there's the infallibilist tradition of the Westminster Confession, where a Christian can attain "infallible assurance" of the faith.

Towards the opposite end of the spectrum are apologists who consider dialogue with atheists to be genuinely open-ended. It could go either way.

These are deeper differences than apologetic method. And it often has a lot to do with the personal experience of individual apologists.

ii) A problem with Van Tilian apologetics is a shallow talent pool. Much shallower than the available pool for classical and evidential apologetics. A lot of what passes for Van Tilian apologetics doesn't get beyond the level of slogans. 

On a related note is Sye ten Bruggencate, who has quite a following among people with low philosophical standards (to put it kindly). 

iii) One further problem is a bad development within Van Tilian apologetics, where Oliphint, Nate Shannon, Dolezal, and even Poythress (who's head and shoulders above the other three) are on the warpath when it comes to univocity. That's a dead-end.

5. Sye Ten Bruggencate 

They are indeed without excuse because the HAVE the evidence, so why are you giving them evidence when Scripture says they already have enough?

Hays

i) Enough for what? Enough to be culpable? 

ii) Having enough evidence to know that God exists isn't the same thing as having enough evidence to know that Christianity is true. Assuming Rom 1 teaches that people generally have natural knowledge of God, it doesn't follow that people have natural knowledge of Christianity, for that is based on historical knowledge, and not something intuitive, innate, or inferable from reason or nature.

iii) There's a distinction between tacit knowledge and conscious knowledge. For instance, people of normal intelligence have a prereflective knowledge of informal logic and math (i.e. how to count). 

But that tacit knowledge can be further developed through analysis. 

iv) People can have enough evidence for something, but be in denial. As such, there are situations in which it's useful to present additional information to make their denial untenable. 

Sye

I don't have any evidence that people have been saved by evidence.

Hays

It's unclear what that's even supposed to mean.

Sye

Give me one example where evidence was presented by Jesus and Paul for the existence of God. Just one please.

Hays

i) Of course, Jesus and Paul were typically dealing with Jewish theists or pagan polytheists. 

ii) In addition, we need to guard against caricaturing sola Scriptura. Sola scripture doesn't mean the Bible is an encyclopedia. Many things are true that fall outside the purview of Scripture. The fact that you can't find something in Scripture doesn't ipso facto mean it's false or unwarranted.

Sye

Please show from Scripture that the 'atheist' does not believe in God. Thanks.

Hays

There's a potential distinction between knowing something and believing something. A wife may suspect that her husband is cheating on her. There's telltale evidence. But she refuses to believe it. 

Sye

How about explain how you can make sense of ANYTHING without presupposing Christian Theism, thanks.

Hays

What does Sye mean by "making sense of x"? Seems to be a basic equivocation here. Surely it's possible to understand a sentence without presupposing Christian theism. You can "make sense of" what a sentence means without presupposing Christian theism.

So does Sye really mean something like you can't justify any of your beliefs without presupposing Christian theism? 

Sye

How about you just tell us ONE thing you know without presupposing Christian theism and how YOU know it? Thanks.

Hays

What about a young child who knows the sound of his father's voice or recognizes his mother's face? 

Sye

So you know something for certain, because it is not doubtable? is that your claim?

Josh used an example of a self-presenting state: pain. I can't be mistaken about feeling pain. I can be mistaken about the source of pain, but not pain itself. 

BTW, this goes to the question of whether all knowledge is propositional.

6. Kelly K Klein

Wow, so that's it, it just seems to be the best explanation for you, I guess until someone convinces you to the contrary. You make your reason and acceptance the standards by which you determine God might exist?

Hays

i) Well, there's an obvious sense in which every Christian must rely on his own reason regarding what seems to be true to him. What's the alternative? You mind is the instrument by which you apprehend truth and falsehood. It's not as if you can climb out of your own skin and see things from a vantage-point independent of your own mind. 

ii) There's an important distinction between knowledge and proof. It's possible to know things we can't prove. Indeed, that's commonplace. Take memory. We can know that something happened because we remember it happening, even though, in many cases, we may have no supporting evidence over and above our memories.

iii) There's a distinction between what I can know and what I can prove to someone else. 

Klein

Why do you claim to be a Christian, is it because to you at the moment it just makes the most sense?

Hays

From a Reformed standpoint, it's ultimately up to God to conserve the faith of the elect.

Klein

But to others it doesn't make the most sense, so who is correct, according to you no one really knows.

Hays

There's a difference between mere belief and belief that's rationally defensible. Notice what a poor job the atheists on these comment threads do at defending their beliefs. Notice how often they resort to sheer assertions and diversionary tactics.

I listened to the Sproul/Bahnsen debate years ago. Sproul is a popularizer. Spreads himself very thin. He's hardly the most able exponent of classical apologetics. Bahnsen is more competent. But in that debate Bahnsen repeatedly committed the semantic fallacy of supposing you can infer a concept of knowledge from quoting a Greek word that's translated "knowledge".

Common grace and paradox

I recently linked toDavid Engelsma's review of a new biography about Gordon Clark:

https://douglasdouma.wordpress.com/2017/03/03/david-engelsma-reviews-the-presbyterian-philosopher/

While I agree with some of what Engelsma says, there are times when his bias clouds his judgment:

i) The CRC has been on the skids for decades, as has Calvin College and Seminary. 

However, at the time of the Clark Controversy, I believe Louis Berkhof was the nemesis of Herman Hoeksema. It would be absurd to suggest that Berkhof doesn't represent authentic Reformed theology. Moreover, the CRC continued to have orthodox representation in later figures like Anthony Hoekema. 

ii) In addition, the OPC, which was founded over 80 years ago, hasn't followed the downward spiral of the CRC. To the contrary, it's maintained an impressive degree of theological stability and conservativism despite changing hands so often.

iii) Although liberals in the OT department at Westminster Seminary were in danger of adulterating the orthodox stance of the seminary, that trend was recently reversed under new administration, and the reversal enjoyed significant support from other departments of the seminary. So Engelsma's predictive trajectory is unreliable. 

iv) Perhaps owing to his age, Engelsma's attack on theological paradox is rather dated. If you're going to attack the principle of theological paradox, a better foil would be the more recent and rigorous formulations by James Anderson. 

I myself don't find Christian theology paradoxical, although it inevitably has dimensions that exceed human comprehension. 

v) Engelsma seems to be oblivious to the fact that Clark's theology became increasingly eccentric in his later years. Flirtations with idealism and occasionalism. Dubious formulations of the Trinity and the hypostatic union. A Sandemanian definition of saving faith. Necessitarianism regarding the creation of the world. 

Moreover, some of these aberrations represent the outworking of his disdain for sense knowledge. 

vi) He fails to mention that Norman Shepherd's views got him fired from Westminster. 

vii) He doesn't bother to explain how the Federal Vision is the logical outworking of theological paradox and/or common grace. 

Invariably, indeed necessarily, the truth being, in fact, rigorously logical, the doctrine of universal, ineffectual grace in the “paradox” drives out the doctrine of particular, sovereign grace.

i) Common grace is not ineffectual. Rather, it serves the purpose for which God intended it.

ii) Common grace is something of a catch-all category, so assessing the claim depends on which elements are included in the package. I prefer the position of Paul Helm and William Young to John Murray in this respect. 

iii) Since, moreover, it denotes something different from saving grace, it's misleading and confusing to use the same designation ("grace") for both. But, unfortunately, that's the standard label.  

Under the influence of Westminster Seminary, the OPC has approved a covenant theology that expressly denies all the doctrines of grace of the Westminster Standards, including justification by faith alone, with special reference to the children of believers.

I'd like to see documentation for that sweeping allegation. 

Easter Resources 2017

Each year, I post a collection of Easter resources. Here are the previous years' posts:

2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016

And here are some representative examples of the issues we've addressed:

Independent, Converging Lines Of Evidence For Jesus' Resurrection
Resurrection Evidence Outside The New Testament
Evidence For The Shroud Of Turin
The 1982 Carbon Dating Of The Shroud Of Turin
The Authorship Of Matthew
The Authorship Of Mark
The Authorship Of Luke And Acts
The Authorship Of John
The Authorship Of The Pauline Letters (see the comments section)
Evidence For The Empty Tomb
Why It's Significant That The Earliest Sources Don't Narrate The Resurrection Appearance To James
Evidence That Saul Of Tarsus Saw Jesus Risen From The Dead
The Spiritual Body Of 1 Corinthians 15
Why Didn't The Risen Jesus Appear To More And Different People?
Matthew 27:52-3
How The Apostles Died
Miracles In The Modern World
Reviews Of Debates On Jesus' Resurrection

We've written some e-books, which are linked on the sidebar on the right side of the screen, and they address some Easter issues.

After the 2016 post on Easter resources linked above, Steve Hays wrote some responses to Bart Ehrman, here, here, and here, which address the resurrection and other topics. And here and here are some posts Steve wrote in response to Ehrman concerning the harmonization of the crucifixion accounts. Steve also addressed how skeptics miscalculate the probability of the resurrection. And here's a response he wrote to Richard Carrier on the argument that the resurrection witnesses wouldn't have died for a lie. A lot of issues came up in the thread, including whether the resurrection witnesses died for a noble lie and whether they had an opportunity to recant before being executed. I put together a collection of links to our material on Matthew's authorship of the first gospel. Steve wrote about the hypothesis that Jesus had a twin brother who was mistakenly thought to be Jesus risen from the dead. And here's another post he wrote on the subject. He also discussed whether the resurrection is extraordinary in the way critics often suggest. And he wrote about whether the resurrection and other miracles are antecedently improbable. I linked a post I wrote on Facebook about how the Suffering Servant prophecy is evidence for Christianity. Steve wrote about animals and the afterlife. And here's something I wrote about Jesus' fulfillment of Psalm 22. I also reviewed a debate between Sean McDowell and Ken Humphreys on the martyrdom of the apostles. Steve wrote about Psalm 16:10 and Jesus' resurrection. He later wrote about how John Goldingay became more appreciative of the resurrection of the body through watching the suffering of his wife. Steve also addressed the implications Gordon Clark's views have for the resurrection. And he linked an article on the relationship between the historicity of Adam and the historicity of Jesus' resurrection. He also linked an article by Edwin Yamauchi about whether the early Christians' belief in Jesus' resurrection was rooted in myth, hallucination, or history. And he discussed what Paul says about the afterlife in 1 Thessalonians 4 and how a Christian view of the afterlife contrasts with non-Christian views. In another post, he addressed the claim that any naturalistic explanation for the evidence pertaining to Jesus' resurrection is preferable to a supernatural explanation. And here's a post Steve wrote about skeptical attempts to dismiss the resurrection appearances as hallucinations and their appeal to Marian apparitions. He also discussed Andy Stanley's views on Jesus' resurrection and the Bible. After that, he addressed objections to a Christian view of the final state. Here's something he wrote in response to Dale Allison on the continuity between the body that dies and the one that rises. He also replied to George Mavrodes on the probability of Jesus' resurrection. In another post, he discussed how Biblical descriptions of the afterlife could be reconciled with incorporeal existence. He also responded to some misgivings Peter Enns expressed about the resurrection of Christ. And he addressed some of the principles involved in judging the consistency of the resurrection accounts. I wrote a series of posts on how the gospels compare to other ancient biographies. Steve wrote about Muhammad's alleged splitting of the moon and how it compares to Christian miracles, such as the darkness at the crucifixion. He also wrote about how God relates to us in the events commemorated at Eastertime. I wrote about how the fulfillment of Isaiah's Suffering Servant passage and other Old Testament prophecies provides modern evidence for Jesus' deity. I also updated my post on the 1982 carbon dating of the Shroud of Turin. Steve reviewed a debate on the resurrection between Mike Licona and Matt Dillahunty here and here. He also contrasted Biblical miracles, like the resurrection of Christ, to miracles of a less purposeful nature.