One of the Cretans, a prophet of their own, said, "Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons." This testimony is true.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about what I’ve read from Van Til and starting to wonder if Presuppositional/Covenantal apologists even have, in principle, an argument that is valid. Let me use Chris Bolt from Choosing Hats Blogs as an example.
In Chris’ introductory post series on Presuppositional/Covenantal apologetics, Chris begins very early with the notion that there is only two worldviews, Christianity and Not-Christianity:
There are only two worldviews. Within these two worldviews, or at any rate within one of them, is a whole plethora of other entities usually referred to as wordviews. A worldview is a network of presuppositions, beliefs, concepts, ideas, etc. through which an individual or individuals view the world. Every person has a worldview; every person has a network of presuppositions and beliefs by which he or she views the world. By viewing the world here I mean thinking in terms of what is right and wrong, good and bad, logical and illogical, sensical and nonsensical, worthwhile and not worthwhile, etc. The list could go on and on as to what is filtered through a worldview. People also act in accordance with these worldviews. It follows from what has been said already concerning people viewing the world through worldviews that people also interact with the world per these conceptual structures.
Now I want to make clear that the posts I'm quoting from is very informal and basic, but the concept here goes straight to the heart of the Presuppositional/Covenantal strategy. One thing I’ve come to appreciate about Van Til is his familiarity with Hegel and Van Til’s use of the Thesis/Anti-thesis idea has a lot in common with my (poor) understanding of Hegel’s monstrous ‘Phenomenology of the Spirit'. In any case, any good Presuppositional/Covenantal apologist is going to affirm this idea that all worldviews can be categorized as either belonging to Christianity or something that is not Christianity.
This idea of there only being a Thesis and Antithesis (Christianity or Not Christianity) sets the stage for the employment of the so-called “Impossibility of the Contrary” here in Part 12:
Or take for example the denial of logic. For one to deny logic, one must affirm logic. That is, if someone denies logic then one is using logic in order to deny logic, thus implicitly affirming logic. If we just throw logic out, then there is no real distinction between denying and affirming logic. Note again that we assume the opposite of the affirmation of logic – its denial – for the sake of argument in order to generate an absurdity. So we see that transcendental arguments, for all of their controversial and unique features, work from the impossibility of the contrary. Or, we might prefer to say that they work from the absurdity of the opposite.
Chris also makes a judicious distinction a few paragraphs later:
By “contrary” here we simply mean the denial of whatever is in view. Contrary is being used in an informal and conversational way, and not in its philosophical sense. In the philosophical or logical sense contraries cannot both be true but they can both be false, whereas here we want to say that if the contrary of a position is false or at any rate impossible, then the original position must be true or necessary.
Part 15 touches the topic again to give a fuller account of the strategy:
In using a transcendental argument we need only consider the competing transcendental which by its very nature is or necessarily involves the opposite or negation of the Christian worldview. It should follow from what we have said above that in order to establish the necessity of the Christian worldview by way of the impossibility of the contrary only the negation of the Christian worldview need be considered.
A bit later in the paragraph Chris writes:
Non-Christianity is simply the negation of Christianity; the Christian worldview. The Christian worldview is what we are out to prove transcendentally. Assuming that we can reduce the negation of the Christian worldview in question to absurdity in a similar way to what we did with the negation of one’s existence and logic we have established the transcendental necessity of the Christian worldview by way of the impossibility of the contrary. Once the contrary of the Christian worldview, namely the non-Christian worldview, is refuted, there is no other competing transcendental left to refute. Not only can there be only one transcendental worldview, but the Christian worldview is sufficient, and one of the two competitors in the apologetic encounter (Christian worldview or non-Christian worldview) must provide the preconditions for the very apologetic discussion in question! The Christian worldview is shown to be sufficient and the non-Christian worldview, in whatever form it may appear, is shown to be insufficient. Hence refuting one particular variation of the non-Christian worldview is refuting them all, and such is rightly dubbed an illustration of the impossibility of the contrary.
This is the point where I’d have to stop Chris, because I think what is being smuggled in here is an implicit premise that Chris’ opponent accepts the 2-value logic that Chris’ argument rests upon.
But why should I simply give that away? What if I insisted on a multi-value logic? Such as Kleene’s 3-valued logic that has a third value that is an intermediate between true and false. There is a large amount of deviant logics to pick from that allow for theorems or valid inferences not available in the classical logic of 2 value truth functions and first order logic (or as I read one smug British logician quip “the tools of standard reasoning“).
I think this problem is a bit more serious than my (much) earlier post about the Presuppositional/Covenantal problem with the Reformed doctrine of God and S5 modal logic. Chris can deny S5 and deal with the details of what this implies at a later time. There is no simple denial available here and I’ll explain why; take this proposition as an example:
(P1) P1 is false
Right away I’m sure most readers recalled this semantic paradox, but to those not yet initiated, this statement is contradictory. How? (P1) is a proposition that implies its own negation and by using the very same classical logic that Chris assumes in his arguments, we can infer that same negation with consequentia mirabilis (CM):
(CM) A -> ~A .:. ~A
So in effect we have:
(P1a) If P1 is true, then it is not true
(P1b) If P1 is false, then it is not false.
Classical logic is telling us is telling us that (P1) is true and that (P1) is false. This means that Chris (and every Presuppositional/Covenantal apologist I’ve ever seen/heard/read) is stuck in a true dilemma.
Chris can agree with his opponent (or me) and do away with classical logic and replace it with some a multi-value logic, but this will require a major revision of the whole concept of the thesis and antithesis, Christianity versus Not Christianity. But that would be easier for Chris to do than disregard this hermeneutic of scripture:
First, it is the consistent testimony of Scripture that there are, at bottom, only two worldviews. There are explicit references which would indicate as much. For example, Christ Jesus says that one is either for Him or against Him. There is no middle ground here. Even if one should disagree with Christ Jesus in His words it follows that the individual doing so would then be in disagreement with Christ Jesus. Thus that individual would be agreeing with the worldview of the non-Christian; it is certainly not of the Christian worldview to question the words of Christ.
If Chris doesn’t do that, his only other real option is to defend his use of classical logic, but this strikes me as a losing proposition since all these multi-value logics were created to resolve these kinds of paradoxes in the first place.
To invoke the mindset of a Presuppositional/Covenantal apologist whom both Chris and I admire, I’d have to repeat the adage,“ inconsistency is a sign of a failed argument.” What could be more inconsistent than a self contradictory logic? If your exegetical method for reading scriptures turned up contradictory readings of the text, what would be the appropriate strategy?
I also wonder how this kind of proposition stands in relation to God. If Chris were to say that (P1) is meaningless (e.g. a proposition that is not true or false), how does God ground a meaningless proposition? How does God ‘exhaustively know’ (Van Til reference) the meaningless?
The best solution I see for the Presuppositional/Covenantal apologist is to create some sort of compromise, where they are allowed some kind of X-value logic to deal with the paradoxes created by classical logics, but somehow are able to get the Bivalence/Excluded Middle needed to force the dilemma of their bifurcated worldview (Christianity/Thesis set against Non-Christianity/Antithesis). How exactly that could be done while denying the other party use of multi-value logic is beyond me.
I also want to note that this strategy would not be useful against the Classical style of apologetics, this objection doesn’t really work with someone like J.P. Moreland or William Lane Craig, because they strategies are a completely different beast than those used by Presuppositional/Covenantal apologists.
In any case, I’d be curious to see how such a problem could be answered. Indeed, it has to be answered according to Chris Bolt:
Coherence refers to whether or not the elements of a worldview are logically compatible with one another. For example, if a worldview rejects contradictions, but claims that there is a magical ghost from a distant planet that exists and does not exist at the same time and in the same respect, that worldview does not cohere – it does not fit together logically – it is incoherent.
