Presuppositionalism, Evidentialism, and Gordon H. Clark

(In Response)

Just to measure carefully, if one is using arguments, one is providing evidence.

Now sometimes the best evidence for something is that everything else is shown to be false or self contradictory (incoherent) and so this or that must be true even if we are not providing empirical substantiation. Providing empirical evidence for someone that we claim is not empirical (God) has always been a bit of a stretch because of the problem of induction. Bahnsen in “the Great Debate” certainly thought he was proving the existence of God. The Van Tillian methodology as a whole is peculiarly about proving the existence of God, even if by the mere impossibility of the contrary, which is a rationalistic argument. X’ is the only rational answer therefore the correct answer; y’ an impossible answer therefore a false answer.

If God is the necessary precondition of intelligibility, the argument holds, but the presupposition is then, intelligibility, not God, because the validity of the logic is the precondition of the deduction that God exists as the conclusion of the argument. Thus God is proved to exist because He is the precondition of proving that He exists. i.e., circularity.

To put it another way, no matter how forcefully someone argues that “God” is the presupposition of the argument, at the end of the day, it is logic. This is necessary because God is the conclusion of the argument. Now Clark, dealt with this necessity by identifying God, His mind, His being, with logic itself, saying that God is logic, and so logic is neither the a priori condition of the conclusion that God exists nor the a posteriori learned response to God’s prior non-rational existence creating logic. (Both Bahnsen and John Frame seem to have followed him on this to the exclusion of Van Til’s theological eccentricities about God and logic. Clark had theological eccentricities of his own, but these were not them.)

If presupposing logic is not identical with presupposing God, one is essentially an Evidentialist, even if one’s methodological affirmations deny it. God is either the precondition of all intelligibility, or He is the logical consequence of intelligibility. If one has an argument that the existence of God is the consequence of, as in, “…therefore, God exists.” it is Evidential.

Because of the epistemological limitations imposed upon all finite beings by them not being God, like that we really cannot prove that our experiences of the external world are accurate representations of what actually exists, and that we cannot prove that other minds exist, that we can neither prove nor justify the laws of logic without using them, which is circular and so means that nothing is justifiable, everyone is really, in the ultimate and final analysis, no matter how hard we fight against the inevitability of it all, a fideist.

We either submit to God in His revelatory knowledge as the ground, beginning and end of all knowledge, or none can be had. We are either empty or full. Meaningful or meaningless. Something or nothing.

Still, the Christian only says this about what can be known by what we might call “natural”, or worldly, or autonomous methodologies. They all end in nothing. What we can actually show is that every version provided so far as an attempt at knowledge has failed; what we claim is that every future attempt will fail with every past attempt because to disregard God is to universally fail epistemologically and morally. Thus we really say that in a strange way the Christian is the only one that is not a fideist. Everyone else takes the world and themselves on faith, suppressing the truth in unrighteousness. It is really a moral and not an epistemological problem.

Really, everyone knows, innately, and without learning, the existence of God and some of His moral and metaphysical properties, and these are the ground for self knowledge and the knowledge of the external world. The reason these cannot be “proven” by objective or non-religious epistemological methods is because there are no objective or non-religious epistemological methods that can arrive at knowledge. The Christian would love to provide everything the natural man claims is necessary to proving the existence of God through some kind of rational empirical data apart from God, but there are none, so we can’t. This is not a flaw or a weakness in Christian Apologetic methods. This is its greatest strength. In Christ, everything can be known, apart from Him nothing that is claimed to be known can be known. The issue of justification in philosophy is the absolute bar to humanistic attempts at knowledge. There simply is none.

Some really sharp guys like J.P Moreland have the taken the epistemic dead end road of Aristotelian Empiricism, but because there is no reason to believe that our senses tell us the truth about the world it is just fideistic wishful thinking. We just keep saying that we really know the world until somebody believes us and call those that deny it preposterous (and then say that God ‘probably’ exists), but some of us need to be more reasonable. Plantinga says that our apprehension of the external world is a ‘Properly Basic Belief’, but he can’t prove it or even make it intelligible as a basis for knowledge, so really he is just saying that Moreland and those like him are right but we don’t need to have any reason why. But that is just ignoring all the problems by pretending they aren’t there. The reason the humanists are winning these debates is because we keep pretending they know what they claim they know, in ways that they can’t even begin to justify, in their claim or pretence to autonomous knowledge.

It’s crazy to say the scientific method is nonsense. Isn’t it? And yet it is nonsense.

This is the kind of thing that Clark was arguing, which is not that God is the necessary consequence of some apparent attributes of the neutrally apprehended world as we find it, but the condition of apprehension. Some people choose to know nothing; some people choose to know God. Really everybody already knows God, and so everyone already has real and true knowledge. These are the only two choices.

Christopher Neiswonger

Presuppositionalism, Evidentialism, and Gordon H. Clark, Presuppositionalism, Evidentialism, and Gordon H. Clark, Presuppositionalism, Evidentialism, and Gordon H. Clark, Presuppositionalism, Evidentialism, and Gordon H. Clark