Presuppositional Apologetics Stated and Defended by Greg Bahnsen

Author:Greg Bahnsen
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Christian
ISBN: 9780915815555
Publisher: American Vision
Published: 2010-04-25T00:00:00+00:00

The issue here is not whether, de facto, one makes instrumental use of the law of contradiction in all his thinking (that is readily granted), but whether, in principium, logic or the truth of Scripture is your absolute presupposition. Clark’s comment either makes an illegitimate separation of epistemology from metaphysics or posits logic as prior to the presupposition of Scripture. (Both errors will be treated infra.)

Possibility vs. Necessity

The observations made above are really nothing but the expected corollaries to Clark’s handling of the notion of “possibility.” God should be taken by the Christian as the source and standard of all material, as well as logical, possibility; He is the one who determines all things (even the operations of the human mind and its limits). But for Clark the possibilities of human imagination and the bare possibilities dictated by formal logic have precedence to God (at least in Clark’s writings). God too seems to be drawn into an environment of “ possibility” (i.e., made subject to the conditions thereof); of course, then, this must also be the case for God’s Word. Instead of demanding that Barth, for example, must recognize the subordination of all thinking to God’s Word because it is our absolute, transcendental presupposition that makes intelligibility, thinking, evaluating, and meaning possible, Clark wants Barth, in considering such a subordination, not to “bluntly rule out this possibility.”

A more skeptical view of the amount of truth obtainable by experimentation, with the help of operationalism, might bring the idea of subordination back again within the limits of possibility. The Scripture is a better source than experimentation is for the norms of ethics and politics; perhaps there is some way to bring physics and zoology also under this authority.[33]

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.