Apologetics to the Glory of God

Tag: apologetic method

  • Should we argue for “general theism”?

     

     

    In my experience the presuppositionalist program of setting out to defend specifically Christian theism generally produces scoffing rather than interaction. At the beginning of his debate with Gordon Stein, Greg Bahnsen states his position on this matter. He says, “I want to specify that I’m arguing particularly in favor of Christian theism, and for it as a unit or system of thought and not for anything like theism in general, and there are reasons for that.”

    There are at least two senses in which Bahnsen explains he will not be arguing for or defending theism in general. Bahnsen …

  • A Fristian Strikes Out

    As I was browsing the Internet today I came across the following from a “John Calvin”:

    “All right. So all the Fristian needs to do is to say that ‘Fristianity’ is whatever subset of Christian claims the TAGster thinks we need for preconditions of intelligibility, *except that* the Trinity is a Quadrinity.”

    How does someone disprove a worldview that has the same propositions as Christianity except for the additional proposition that there is a fourth person in God?

    In my view, thinking of the “preconditions of intelligibility” as a “subset of Christian claims” may be a rather substantial error, but …

  • The Possibility of Middle Knowledge

    I’m going to include the transcript of a discussion I had (along with several others) with a Middle Knowledge proponent that frequents AOMin’s chat channel. The reason I do so is in order to give an example of how the argument I advanced recently functions in an actual discussion.

    The discussion was fairly wide-ranging, but I think demonstrates the ability of a consistent return to the nature of God as the foundation of a reply to the assertions advanced by proponents of MK and other similar philosophical systems, over against the Biblical conception of God’s nature and the modal collapse …

  • Proving the Bible

    Jamin Hubner at Real Apologetics has written another very fine article which may be found here.…

  • An Objection That Does Not Count

    Non-Christians can and do engage in activities using logic, science, and morality. Christians do as well. Presuppositionalists claim that these two groups can do so only because the world is what God says it is.

    The argument advanced for this claim begins with one of the accepted activities mentioned above (logic, science, or morality) and illustrates how this activity is possible if the world is what God says it is. Then the accepted activity is shown to be inconsistent with what anyone else other than God says the world is.

    While it might be said that the non-Christian cannot and …

  • Bravo Nocterro

    Kudos to Nocterro (who sometimes comments here) for writing a pretty clear explanation of what presuppositionalists have been saying for some time now.

    Showing that the Bible is correct in its historical claims does not show it is correct in its theological claims…

    Imagine for the sake of argument that someone showed that Jesus did indeed resurrect…All it would show is that a man resurrected, not that Yahweh exists and that such a being was the cause of such an event. It could have been that it was the doing of some other sort of god, or even something else

    …

  • Ryft Braeloch’s Response To Mitch LeBlanc Regarding TAG

    Ryft Braeloch at The Aristophrenium has written Part 1 of a response to Mitch LeBlanc’s article “The Transcendental Argument for the Existence of God” which is certainly worth a read.…

  • A Brief Word On The Transcendental Argument For The Existence Of God

    Immanuel Kant is known for having coined a term and utilized an argument which is now referred to as transcendental, though it may be traced back even further, having been used in some sense by Aristotle (as one example). Cornelius Van Til, writing from the Continental Tradition in Philosophy, wrote extensively concerning a transcendental argument which is utilized to prove Christianity. Greg L. Bahnsen, a student of Van Til, is best known for having brought the argument, or at least something very much like the argument, into the realm of public debate and for having attempted to clarify it …

  • Lost In A Sea Of Subjectivism

    Mitch LeBlanc has posted the draft for his journal submission on The Transcendental Argument for the Existence of God. In the Abstract for the article, he writes, “I present a couple of objections formulated by Sean Choi and Michael Martin and develop three of my own”. It has been pointed out already that whatever Mitch is arguing against, it is not Bahnsen’s TAG. Given that even I, though not very well read on TAG, had encountered the objections from Choi and Martin no later than 2007 and given the recent interaction found here and here with some of the …

  • Pragmatic Point: The Failure of the Cartesian Method of Doubt

    In his Meditations on First Philosophy, Rene Descartes utilizes a method of doubt in order to determine whether or not there is any such thing as certainty. The American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce later critiques Descartes not necessarily on the basis of what many other philosophers find fault with in Descartes, but rather on the very method of doubt itself. While there appears to be plenty of room for debate about whether or not Peirce is fair to Descartes with respect to parts of Descartes’ method of doubt, Peirce is justified in the main point of his critique which …