I'd like to hear the argument that other worldviews cannot have just-so accounts for the origins of things and why things are the way they are. Christianity is not the only religion that offered explanations. Of course, what are your arguments that your explanations are the correct ones?
@MickJagger-el6of I disagree. My worldview does assert there is objective truth. I generally hold to a correspondence theory of truth. So there are certain state of affairs in reality and humans like myself can form propositions that describe those state of affairs and thus express truth. So if I assert "the cat is on the mat" and there indeed is a cat on the mat, then I have expressed a true proposition. Please explain how there can be no truth if some god doesn't exist.
@MickJagger-el6of _" Your worldview doesn’t support your ability to even write that sentence, let alone to engage along lines of reason in search of truth."_ An interesting claim. Would I be correct in stating that you believe this to be true of all worldviews that aren't your own, thereby implicating mine as well? Is this something you can show to be objectively true, or is it only true in virtue of the presuppositions of your own worldview? _"Because in your worldview, truth, reason, logic, beauty, morality; none of these exist outside subjective opinion."_ That seems pretty dubious. Same question as before, is this something you can show to be objectively true, or is it only true in virtue of the presuppositions of your own worldview? _"You must by reason borrow from another’s worldview to substantiate such things"_ Nope. That doesn't appear to be the case at all, but I'd love to hear your rationale behind the claim. _"The universe compels a necessary creator by pure reason. "_ Does the universe compel that, or does your worldview? (Hint: It's your worldview, but don't feel bad... That reification fallacy is one of the foundational fallacies of presup and if you guys didn't do your darnedest to try and equate your worldview with the universe at every opportunity, your adorable little apologetic would never even get off the ground, so I understand why you do it) _"Your worldview without God, is fractured and inconsistent."_ Is it? Seems pretty contiguous, consistent and coherent from where I'm standing. But let me guess, you're judging the coherency of my worldview, using _your_ standards, right? Funny how that always seems to be the case with presuppers. Since the whole presup schtick boils down to the trivial claim that: "If I start by assuming the truth of the Christian worldview, then no other worldview can be true" I'm happy to grant that to you. My question is, so what? Why would I care that your worldview is mutually exclusive with mine? That's really all you're saying.
I think we can agree all humans are fallible. I don't understand how the presuppositionalist knows with absolute certainty (no logical possibility) his own personal revelation is true by relying on his own fallible reasoning? What if this revelation is just in the presupp's imagination? Secondly, what does this "revelation" fell like?
Eli, did you ever follow up with TJump after you had that debate with him. I got the impression that you wanted to get out of there when you debated him.
Assuming we share the same understanding of what an internal critique is, (temporarily suspending our own worldview, and adopting the worldview, presuppositions, etc of our interlocutor in order to evaluate internal consistency and coherency of their worldview) how can I provide an internal critique while still holding to your most important rule of the presuppositional apologetic? (To never meet on neutral ground / never give up my own presuppositions) It seems to me that if I never yield with regards to my own worldview, any critique of any other worldview is necessarily going to be an external critique and that is going to result in a critique that seems to boil down to, "From within my worldview, your worldview doesn't make any sense." That seems true and I think many people would even grant that, but it doesn't strike me as a very compelling form of argumentation. Similarly if I'm asking an atheist to justify things like logic and reason from within their worldview, are we even talking about the same things? It seems to me that all of these things from within the Christian worldview aren't just grounded in God, they are also defined in terms of God. The concepts are inextricably linked to God. If we're using the same words, but talking about different concepts, I don't understand how that's a productive conversation. To offer an analogy, I once had a roommate named Anthony. Unbeknownst to me, his family called him AJ. (Which is how I'm typically addressed) One day his sister called and I answered the phone. (many years ago when land lines were the only phones) She asked to speak to AJ and I told her she was speaking to him. She insisted that I wasn't and that I should put AJ on the phone. I asked who was calling. She said she was AJ's sister. And while I do have a sister I was confident this was not her and told her as much. This continued for a brief time, while the politeness of the conversation was starting to decline. Eventually we figured out that we were using the same words,(or names in this case) but we were talking about totally different things. Until we sorted that out, we were just talking past each other and both getting increasingly frustrated. So how would I avoid that sort of equivocation? Asking the atheist to defend his own concept of logic and reason would be meeting him on neutral ground, no? Why would it matter if he can justify his own concept of those things? But it seems kinda disingenuous to demand that he account for Godly-logic or Godly-reason in his worldview. I get that we can show that he can't account for Godly-logic and Godly-reason, which is the point, but like the previous issue I don't see why that's a compelling argument since he already rejects Godly-logic and Godly-reason to begin with.
It really is pretty simple. Take Christianity on its own terms and demonstrate on its own presuppositions that it is either self-refuting, contradictory, or incoherent. Or, that it doesn’t meet its own standards or something along those lines. For instance, If biblical teaching asserted that God is so transcendent that nothing in human language could rightfully describe Him, on that presupposition, the Bible itself could not be what it claims to be. That would be an internal critique. Now, of course, the Bible doesn’t teach this, but I think you get the idea. -Hope that helps:)
Example- The unbeliever presupposes that he or she can account for logic, but can he or she account for a single universal statement such as A is always A and never its negation? Can he or she talk intelligibly about A unless A has identity, and identity overtime? So, accounts for identity and identity overtime? On the biblical worldview, A is A universally because God is always true, revealing, and God created this world, so it can be rationally understood. God secures the identity and identity over of every fact. So the biblical worldview can make sense of logic, but what about the non-biblical worldview? So they are either being inconsistent with their worldview or borrowing from the biblical worldview.
@@RevealedApologetics 31:16 _"You do not, under any circumstance, give up that presupposition [that God exists and his word is true] ... To do so is to stumble into the realm of neutrality."_ That seems pretty straightforward to me but it also seems to preclude the possibility of performing an internal critique on someone else's worldview. Again, unless we have a totally different concept of what an internal critique is (I understand it to be the temporary substitutions of your own worldview with your interlocutor's in order to evaluate the other worldview on it's own terms) the concept seems totally incompatible with never abandoning the presuppositions you listed above. Am I to perform an internal critique or hold to my own presuppositions? I do not see a way that I can do both.
Further, presuppositionalism is a very weak form of apologetics when speaking to someone with a logically coherent worldview. Example, Vedanta, Neo-platonism, Spinozian Metaphysics, etc.
@ajhieb You have expressed this beautifully. I was wondering that myself. Eli, this would make a great subject for a future podcast, I think. Your answer here was too brief in my opinion to get to the heart of the question.
Thinking a little more about this after sleeping on it. If you start by presupposing God's existence and argue from that position, isn't it trivially true that any worldview that denies God's existence is absurd? Because it contradicts the presupposition. I'm having trouble seeing any substance in this apologetic approach. Eli can you sort that out for me?
@@babyfoot- Your point is entirely fair - the approach reduces to a "p, :. p" tautology, but Eli does describe this as a "method", and that's how Bahnsen described it ( and pretty much created it), too. It's not really philosophy at all, but it disguises an unsupported (and unsupportable) premise with stuff that SOUNDS like philosophy. It's a rhetorical persuasion technique designed to shut down debate with anyone who disagrees with the unsupported premise, and reinforce a *fideistic* assertion amongst those who already accept it. There's very little here of any substance, and those that take it seriously are revealing a blind spot in their thinking which is easily exposed by simply asking the "salesman" to *support their claim*. This is never done, as the same assertion is just repeated in a different form (ie - "the impossibility of the contrary"), before the fallacious burden-shifting move is employed. Any interlocutor can happily grant that their own "worldview" is incoherent, but that doesn't mean that the presup claim is true, so the onus is back on the presup to support their hopelessly ambitious claim. This cannot be done - and the "method" is designed to avoid it at all costs - so we're left with an empty sack, propped up by dubious, rhetorical tactics. It's a bit like asserting that a sceptical scenario ('brain in a vat', etc) IS *necessarily* the case, and presenting this unfalsifiable and indefensible assertion with gusto! Since the assertion is logically *possible*, and is insulated from disproof, those with a blind spot think they're home and dry. But claiming that a logically possible scenario is *necessarily* the case is just wrong-headed, and reveals that either the claim-maker doesn't know enough about philosophy, or that they DO know, but don't care about intellectual honesty and have abandonned it. Both of these horns are equally unsatisfactory, and equally undesirable. :)
What if I were to presupp protestants. If you believe in an invisible church and sola scriptura, that is incoherent. Who gave us scripture? God's people handed it down to us. But how do we know who God's people are? We have to check them against scripture. Neither concept has any meaning anymore than because they are viciously circular.
Eli, you went longer than you thought? You could have gone twice as long and I'd still like it. Can you do a part two and just address common objections?
Lol! Definitely. However, I’ll need specific objections to go on since people bring up all sorts of objections. If you have some of mind, please feel free to share them. :-) blessings
@@RevealedApologetics You may have heard something like, God saved us from God, by the sacrifice of God, who of course created us knowing, even foreordaining, we would sin and need saving.
Timestamps: 0:00 - Introduction 4:17 - Presentation begins 4:39 - Problem in Apologetics 8:15 - Why Do We Love the Traditional Arguments? 10:36 - Overcoming Fear 18:16 - Danger of the Apologetic 22:34 - Place of Scripture 24:47 - What are we doing? 26:00 - What is Presuppositional Apologetics? 33:28 - Give Me Evidence!!! 36:48 - A Thing About Evidence 44:40 - Presuppositions to be Examined 47:15 - What is Required for Evidence? 47:45 - When Someone Says: Give Me Evidence!!! 49:47 - What Do People Mean By "Give Me Evidence!!!"? 51:38 - Nice Atheist: Give Me Evidence 53:25 - Atheist Trolls: Give Me Evidence 55:03 - What is Evidence? 55:39 - Presuppositions of Evidence 56:20 - Lay Down the Gauntlet 57:10 - Q&A Enjoy! Soli Deo Gloria
Eli, I really appreciate this presentation. It helped a lot for me to understand where presup apologists are coming from. It makes them sound way less crazy, and I like when that happens (I am not a Christian, btw)
Jesus is Lord! “God exists, His word is true and we argue FROM that position, not TO that position.” Metaphysics, Epistemology and Ethics. This is a firm place to stand. Thanks Eli.
Presup isn't taken seriously outside of Calvinist circles. Also why is it an issue for atheists to judge the evidence? People judge God in the Bible, he even invites judgement in Isaiah, if the atheist judges incorrectly then thats his problem.
