“From time immemorial all people have assumed that they must begin with thinking with themselves for there is no other place where they must begin. (p. 212) If man were the starting point, we all would have this in common and thus an initial point of contact. (pg. 214)
We must start with ourselves rather than God:
1.) It is psychologically impossible for us to start with God (as it is impossible for God to start with us.)
2.) It is logically impossible for us to start with God for we cannot affirm God without assuming logic and our ability to predicate.
3.) It is logically impossible to show the rational necessity of presupposing God except by rational arguments. (pg. 223-224)
That is, we admit, the charge of autonomy … that we begin autonomously.” (pg 231)
Sproul, Lindsey, Gerstner (SLuG)
Classical Apologetics
1.) The appeal “from time immemorial” is an example of the “ad-populum” fallacy. It is an appeal that the statement put forth is true simply because a large number of people have believe it is true. Gordon H. Clark used to famously say; “You don’t come to truth by counting noses.”
2.) It is also not true that “from time immemorial all people have assumed” what SLuG insist all people have been assuming. Those who have done all this assuming have largely belonged to the Golden Age of Greece (300-500 BC). There were plenty of people who did not belong to this pre-Socratic Greek philosopher age who are not being taken into consideration. All people have not always assumed, though doubtless many people did. What SLuG has done above is to errantly assume that “all people assumed” the Greek philosophic concepts of human autonomy and sufficiency of reason. Clearly, the authors of Scripture did not assume these concepts of Greek philosophy.
3.) When SLuG offers; “for there is no other place where they must begin,” in the matter of thinking except for themselves as the thinkers, they already give away the game. This is a subtle embrace of De Cartes, “I think therefore I am (cogito ergo sum). ” For anyone to think that thinking must begin with the thinker is to presuppose humanism. It is to presuppose a man centered universe. Now, of course, man must do the thinking. That is not the question. The question is, “On what basis of authority does man conclude what he concludes when he does his thinking.” For SLuG man’s authority for concluding what he concludes when he thinks is man. However, the questions that should immediately presents themselves to SLuG is, “What does God say about me as a thinker?” “What does it even mean to be a thinking man?” “What is my thinking unless it is thinking that is consistent with God’s thinking?” “Is thinking even thinking if it is not an attempt to think God’s thoughts after Him or would it better be called “‘anti-thinking thinking?'”
4.) “all people have assumed that they must begin with thinking with themselves for there is no other place where they must begin.”
There is no other place to begin thinking except with themselves as the source and authority of their thinking? Scripture begs to differ. In Isaiah 8:19-20 Israel was chasing after alternate sources and authorities as the foundation of their thinking.
19When men tell you to consult the spirits of the dead and the spiritists who whisper and mutter, shouldn’t a people consult their God instead? Why consult the dead on behalf of the living? 20To the law and to the testimony! If they do not speak according to this word, they have no light of dawn.
If SLuG had been speaking instead of Isaiah, SLuG would have advised the people of Isaiah’s time to consult with themselves thinking instead of consulting with the spirits of the dead and the spiritists. However, the answer would have been the same
20 To the law and to the testimony! If they do not speak according to this word, they have no light of dawn.
Scripture teaches that our beginning point in all our thinking should be God and His Word. The beginning point in all our thinking is not the autonomous thinker doing the thinking sans SLuG and all Natural Law theories.
5.) Next they offer up; “If man were the starting point.” Is this a concession that there might indeed be a different starting point besides man? What SLuG is seeking to do here is to corral everybody into embracing man being the starting point. The “thinking” seems to be; “If those nasty presuppositionalists, who contest this matter of a humanist starting point, would just go away we could make progress because all men would then have common ground.”
6.) Even if we would have all this in common, in terms of a starting point for out thinking, that wouldn’t mean the results would be successful evangelism. The God that is arrived at via the means of a Natural Law thinking that posits that man is the beginning point of all thinking is not the God of Christianity. The God of Christianity can never be the end result of a thinking that is characterized by man being the authoritative beginning point in concluding that God is. The God that is arrived at by the Arminian starting point of man by necessity must be only an Arminian god. That god is not God.
7.) This kind of thinking that SLuG is offering above moves the idea of common ground between the believer and the heathen from a common ground that says all reality is reality as God names it to a common ground that says all reality is reality as man names it. By beginning with the autonomous man with his man-centered reasoning as the “initial point of contact” we have allowed the autonomous man to think he has no reason to give up his autonomy. Such a man, even if he “accepts” God will be accepting a god whose authority is not self-attesting but will be accepting a god whose authority will have as its foundation autonomous man’s authority.
8.) Next SLuG claims that “it is psychologically impossible” for us to start with God. I am not sure what is meant here by invoking psychology. Perhaps SLuG means that it has to be man who thinks. Again, no one doubts that. The issue here isn’t whether or not man has to be the one who thinks. The question here is; “On what (or whose) authority is man, as the one who is thinking, required to presuppose in his thinking.” SLuG insists that autonomous man is his own authority. Presuppositionalists insist that man can never be presuppositional-less in his thinking and so man, when he thinks, is required to not presuppose his own authority in his thinking but is to presuppose God and His Word in his thinking.
9.) Scripture clearly teaches that we must presuppose God and His Word in our thinking. Scripture teaches;
“In thy Light we see light.” Psalm 36:9
Here we see that only as God and His Word is presupposed can we come to true truth. If we are to have any light, it must be light that finds God as the ultimate source of our light. God is the beginning point of all knowing (light).
Jesus Christ said;
“I am the way the truth and the life.” (John 14:6)
Obviously, there is no coming to any truth as a thinking man unless that truth begins with He who is the truth.
Paul says in Colossians 2:3 the inspired Apostle who was not beginning with Himself writes;
in whom (Christ) are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.
The first hidden treasure of wisdom and knowledge the heathen must be presented with is that he is not the one in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. It must be pressed upon the heathen, (quite to the contrary of SLuG) that he must yield to the Lord Christ if he desires to be one who can think well. Indeed, this truth must also be pressed on SLuG and their autonomous thinking Natural Law followers.
10.) SLuG next moves on to this claim;
It is logically impossible for us to start with God for we cannot affirm God without assuming logic and our ability to predicate.
a.) Here SLuG moves on from psychology to logic. However, they don’t seem to understand that logic is only logical if one begins by starting with the God of the Bible. Logic that does not presuppose God will quickly become illogical logic. In order for an appeal to logic to make any sense God must be the one whom we start with and whom we affirm.
b.) What SLuG has done here is that it has lifted abstracted logic above God who alone makes logic, logical. If our starting point is with autonomous man logic can arrive at anything. Why, a logic that does not presuppose God can even arrive at the idea that men can be born who are inhabiting a female body.
c.) Similarly, the ability to predicate presupposes that autonomous fallen man’s ability to predicate apart from starting with God’s predicating.
11.) Finally SLuG reaches for this
It is logically impossible to show the rational necessity of presupposing God except by rational arguments.
a.) The idea of what is possible or impossible in terms of logic is entirely dependent upon presupposing God since God is the one upon whom logic is dependent in order to be logical.
b.) Scripture teaches in Colossians 1;
16 For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him:
17 And he is before all things, and by him all things consist.
When we read above “all things were created by Him, and for Him,” and again “by him all things consist,” I take that to be inclusive of the ideas of logic and rational arguments. In other words logic is God’s logic and so in order for logic to be employed one must do so by starting with and presupposing the God of logic. Similarly, rational arguments can only be rational if the God of rationality is presupposed.
So because of the above statements we presuppositionalists quite agree that;
It is logically impossible to show the rational necessity of presupposing God except by rational arguments.
We only go on to say that since logic can only be logic if it is God’s logic, it is logically impossible to use logic in order to show the rational necessity of presupposing God except by rational arguments that presuppose God.
“This is a subtle embrace of De Cartes, “I think therefore I am (cogito ergo sum).”
Cartesian thought is a very good illustration of Cornelius Van Til’s famous metaphor of fallen man being like a little girl who climbs onto her grandfather’s lap – only to slap him in the face. Belief in benevolent God, who surely would not deceive us, saved Descartes from his deep “sceptical crisis,” but after getting over that intellectual ordeal, he went on to create an impudently humanistic, or man-centered, thought system:
https://books.google.fi/books?id=cQ8xzDLYWfsC&lpg=PP1&hl=fi&pg=PA154#v=onepage&q&f=false
“Descartes eliminates the possibility that the deity possesses demonic features by stressing the character of our idea of God. If the idea of God cannot include demonic elements, then what is clear and distinct about the idea must be true about the object, God himself. “I recognize it to be impossible that He should ever deceive me; for in all fraud and deception some imperfection is to be found, and although it may appear that the power of deception is a mark of subtilty or power, yet the desire to deceive without doubt testifies to malice or feebleness, and accordingly cannot be found in God.”56 Descartes did not consider the possibility that it may be the demon, rather than God, who has supplied him with his idea of God, and who has compelled him to come to antidemonic conclusions about the moral nature of the deity. But, with this conception of God, based on the clear and distinct idea of him, Descartes was now ready to march on triumphantly to his promised land, the new world of dogmatism where knowledge of truth and reality could be completely assured, since “I now have before me a road which will lead us from the contemplation of the true God … to the knowledge of the other objects of the universe.”57
…
The demon having been exorcised from heaven and earth, there then remained no question about the truths of mathematics. Once the criterion of clear and distinct ideas had been founded on God’s guaranteed honesty, the initial doubts, the initial Pyrrhonism, vanished, for one could now tell what was true, what constituted evidence, and so forth. From here on, all is relatively safe and easy. Mathematical truths are clear and distinct. We are compelled to believe them, and in this compulsion we are secure since God is no deceiver. The relationship of these truths of Nature can also be discovered by our trust in God. We can be sure that there is a physical world to which the truths about pure extension apply, since God would not make us think so unless there was in fact such a world beyond the reach of our ideas.58
The atheist is not able to have this security about the objective truth of his clear and distinct ideas, because he does not have a God to guarantee what he thinks he knows.”
Descartes still did possess some kind of Christian mentality. But he had forged an intellectual weapon that could cause great destruction in less scrupulous hands, and soon after him came the infidel Jew Spinoza, who took Cartesian philosophy and remodelled it into the very godless Spinozist worldview (much like Marx built on the foundation of Hegelian philosophy to create his own subversive ideology).
https://archive.org/details/radicalenlighten0000isra/page/482/mode/2up?view=theater
“‘We know,’ he avers, ‘that Spinoza developed his philosophy with greater consistency from his premises and principles than Descartes; for it is easy to improve what another found first and repair its defects.’42 Spinoza, furthermore, ‘is less cautious than Descartes and says straight out, uninhibitedly, what Descartes, owing to circumstances and his desire to pass for a Christian, neither wished, nor dared, to say.’43”