Bill Snedden

Not at all an uncommon experience.

Most of the other posters have already given you some idea of what this "thing" is. The Martin-Frame exchange hosted in the "Transcendental Arguments" section of the SecWeb (to which Taffy Lewis provided a link) has some examples of debates based on this "proof", but no formal statements of it. However, you can find at least one interested party's attempt to formalize it <a href="http://www.ccir.ed.ac.uk/~jad/vantil-list/archive-Feb-1998/msg00017.html" target="_blank">here</a> in an article posted to the VanTil mailing list in 1998.

Essentially the Christian Presuppositionalist (CP) is attempting to argue that:

P1: Without God, human knowledge and experience would be completely unintelligible.
P2: Human knowledge and experience are actually intelligible.
C1: Therefore, God exists.

There is a sense in which this is very much like the Ontological arguments with which most of us are at least passingly familiar. However, most CPs would probably cringe to hear it referred to as such. To them, it is perhaps more of a "meta-Ontological" argument, seeking, as it does in a sense, to ground ontology itself.

Cornelius VanTil (to whom much of current presuppositionalist methodology owes its existence) was fond of pointing out that standard "logical" argument and "proofs" of God's existence were unsatisfactory and bound to fail because all they did was "...point to another spot in the Universe." God, however, transcends the Universe, therefore it is necessary for a successful argument to point beyond.

Of course, as Bloop has pointed out, this method may seem to serve non-Christian supernaturalists as well as Christians. CPs respond that only the Christian God has the necessary attributes to render knowledge and experience intelligible. However, I have yet to see a successful defense of this proposition.

Neither does the argument deal successfully with the question, "how do you know that there is a "beyond?" It's simply assumed at the start. Of course, this also leaves open the question of why the "transcendent entity" shouldn't require another to support it by the same logic (Of course, the CPs do have an answer for this. It just doesn't make any sense.)

Interestingly, the Teleological argument of C.S. Lewis to which Taffy also links explicitly includes the possibility that Naturalism might, in fact, be true; something that CPs must of necessity deny*. In fact, Lewis' argument, although simililarly intended as a defeater of naturalism, would be considered useless by VanTil and his school, depending as it does upon non-transcendent argumentation.

My opinion: there is no proof required or possible for being qua being; it simply is.

Regards,

Bill Snedden

* Because the argument holds that only Christian theism contains the necessary elements to ground human knowledge, even an admission that Christian theism might not be true would be logically self-contradictory.

[ October 04, 2002: Message edited by: Bill Snedden ]</p>

Bloop

Bill Snedden:
This is such an enormous assumption. I don't know if Van Til and others mean that Christiantiy is the only system avaliable to us that can account for human knowledge. Or worse, if it isn't logically possible to even think of another legitimate system. Try proving that negative.

Now. Consider the greatest imaginable epistemological system. The greatest imaginable
system must in fact blah blah blah....[fade out]

Bloop

Bloop

The link that Bill provided is great. I don't know who the persons are that are in the discussion but one has provided a formal TA that doesn't repeat doesn't prove that Christianity is the one system providing a basis for human knowledge. It only goes to show that some basis is needed. And that isn't really to say a whole lot is it. At least not compared to what Van Til draws from this.

My emphasis. So, again, somebody needs to build upon this argument and try to show somehow why only a Christian system would suffice.

Somehow I can't help to feel that if you pinpoint the exact attributes needed to provide for a basis for human knowledge you do not end up with a trifurcating tribal god with the plethora of attributes normally ascribed to the Christian God

If you extract the necessary attributes and form an epistemic black box with them you may also perhaps please Ockham.

Bloop