Bahnsen and Van Til: Arguing from Absurdity
I’ve recently been reading Bahnsen’s book where categorizes and introduces Van Til’s writings. I’ve always wanted to understand the intellectual leaders of the reformed Christian movement better. One thing they talk about is arguing for the impossibility of of the contrary, meaning that they attempt to show that all thought and discourse is made possible by the Christian Worldview so anyone who is not working within a Biblical framework is not able to think or speak in a meaningful way. Here is one place where Bahnsen explains this:
The unbeliever attempts to enlist logic, science, and morality in his debate against the truth of Christianity. Van Til’s apologetic answers these attempts by arguing that only the truth of Christianity can rescue the meaningfulness and cogency of logic, science, and morality. The presuppositional challenge to the unbeliever is guided by the premise that only the Christian worldview provides the philosophical preconditions necessary for man’s reasoning and knowledge in any field whatever. This is what is meant by a “transcendental” defense of Christianity. Upon analysis, all truth drives one to Christ. From beginning to end, man’s reasoning about anything whatsoever (even reasoning about reasoning itself) is unintelligible or incoherent unless the truth of the Christian Scriptures is presupposed. Any position contrary to the Christian one, therefore, must be seen as philosophically impossible. It cannot justify its beliefs or offer a worldview whose various elements comport with each other.
What was unique about Van Til’s approach was to try to describe the conditions necessary for thought and discourse. The trouble is that anyone could make a claim like this: worldview X is true so only things in line with that worldview make sense, therefore no one can reason or speak outside of worldview X. The problem is that this argument, just like any argument, presupposes that humans can form arguments. Van Til runs into the same problem that epistemology has faced going back to Descartes and back to the Greeks: everyone talks about “reason” but it is never defined. If Van Til had identified reason as the laws of thought, and connected those who the Word of God in us as described in John 1:4, then he might have been able to substantiate the claim that all thought and discourse is grounded in the Word of God.
