Year: 2011

By C.L. Bolt

What I endeavored to accomplish in the pieces preceding this post was not to provide an exhaustive account of all things presuppositional but to grant the readers a very basic level knowledge of Van Tillian presuppositionalism also known as Covenantal Apologetics without fancy terminology or at least with definitions when technical language was used. My hopes were to write something merely from memory as opposed to turning to sources and then collecting them in a Works Cited or Bibliography. I did not mean to go back and correct much of what I wrote or to answer objections …

By C.L. Bolt

Non-Christians suppress the truth in unrighteousness, distorting every fact. Unbelievers are both spiritually and intellectually lost, believing themselves to be final authorities with respect to their own intellectual evaluations of the world. Yet in appealing to one’s own authority one appeals to a shifting foundation that certainly does not serve as a norm. Truth itself is relative in this scheme. The standards, purpose, meaning, motivation, etc. for reasoning are completely lost in this assumption of the possibility of thought independent of God. This series has sought to show in some detail how the creaturely mind asserting its …

By C.L. Bolt

Islam is much more similar to the Christian worldview than atheism or agnosticism. Some varieties of the non-Christian worldview are so much like the Christian worldview that they actually admit to borrowing from the Christian worldview, and Islam is one of these. Islam states that faith is the starting point and Muslims place their faith in the Bible “like” the Christian does (on the surface). When the Bible is claimed as the starting point by an unbelieving system of thought, how might we begin to answer that system?

Many Christians are unaware that Muslims claim that the …

By C.L. Bolt

Since Romans 1 teaches a universal belief in God, if the Christian world view is true, then agnosticism is contradictory and thus false. But let’s assume for the sake of argument that agnosticism is true, and the agnostic really does not know whether or not God exists:

If God exists, then everyone knows that God exists;
The agnostic does not know that God exists;
Therefore, God does not exist.

The agnostic’s position of agnosticism assumes at the outset that God does not exist. But this is atheism, not agnosticism. For agnosticism to both be agnosticism and not …

By C.L. Bolt

So much work has been done regarding atheism that one hesitates to add much more concerning it in an introduction to covenantal apologetics. The atheist must be pressed for consistency in every area, and her inconsistencies immediately pointed out. The problems of skepticism described in this series are so easily applied to atheism that those new to this method of apologetics sometimes mistakenly think that the method is only applicable to atheism.

The atheist will mockingly demand evidence for the existence of God all the while pretending as though she is neutral with respect to any evidence …

By C.L. Bolt

Polytheism posits that there are multiple entities which go by the label “god,” but these entities are often so much like humans that they do not merit the label. Positing all-knowing, all-present, all-powerful gods in the plural results in a number of contradictions between those attributes such that these conceptions typically only possess slightly above and beyond what humans possess in terms of knowledge, presence, and power. They are nothing like the God of the Bible. It is not difficult to see why, given what has been discussed in this series; polytheism fails to provide an account …

By C.L. Bolt

The covenantal apologist should highlight the many fundamental differences between the Christian and deistic positions, for they are not so similar as many would presume in the context of covenantal apologetics. A deist god may of course be posited as solving many of the same problems that the Christian God does insofar as this clock-making god provides an immaterial absolute to ground such things as logic and morality in, but this objection to covenantal apologetics comes mostly as the result of having been trained to think like a classical apologist. Once we take a closer look at …

By C.L. Bolt

Once theology and history are separated there are insurmountable problems with the discipline. History cannot speak concerning God once this happens in an epistemology, since God as a supernatural being is not a historical fact in this false system of thought. God is no longer the kind of God who can act in history in any way that we are able to know it. Such a god is not the God of Christian Scripture. The God described in the Christian Scripture has spoken as an authority concerning His great acts in history brought about to finally accomplish …

By C.L. Bolt

The presuppositional, transcendental, and skeptical considerations brought out in this introduction are easily applied to particular manifestations of the non-Christian worldview. They can be similarly applied to tools that are heavily relied upon by these particular manifestations of the non-Christian worldview. For example, science rests upon many of the principles brought forth so far in this series, including especially the senses, induction, and the uniformity of nature. When the nonbeliever desires to use an argument against Christianity from the disciplines of science or history (etc.) the Christian apologist can point out that these disciplines require the Christian …