Van Til, Evangelicals, and Barth

Below are my initial musings on Karl Barth and American Evangelicalism.

George Harinck gives a fascinating essay on how Dutch and American Neo-Calvinism reacted to Barth. In doing so, he gives new light on Van Til’s own career.

DG Hart has a fun essay on Evangelicalism’s reading of Van Til’s reading of Barth.  Van Til’s attack on Barth, at least the later ones, was a confessional Presbyterian attack.  As such, it was also an attack on Princeton’s modernism.   This put neo-Evangelicalism in a tough position.  For them, if Van Til offered a good critique of Barth and a defense of inerrancy, fine.  If Van Til seemed to be arguing for Presbyterian Confessionalism, then he can take his quarrel elsewhere.  My own concerns with this essay is that I don’t think neo-Evangelicalism was truly enamored with Barth.  Certainly not when Carl Henry led the movement.  Later neo-evangelicals might have been, but by that time the PCUSA (or what would later  become of it post-1967) had already apostasized.  Simply tagging them as “Barthians” isn’t entirely accurate.

Bruce McCormack responds to Van Til’s reading of Barth.  McCormack said Van Til misread Barth’s use of Kant. For Kant, the a priori forms organize our knowledge; they do not determine it (and so it is not true, per Van Til, that a Kantian couldn’t tell the difference from a snowball and an orange).  In fact, Kant held to an empiricism as to the phenomenal world.

The one strength in Van Til’s reading, however, is that Barth did admit that Hans urs von Balthasar’s position was similar to his own.  If this is true, then it is fatal to Barth’s position. Complicating the matter is that Barth seems to say von Balthasar is correct.  I think, however, that Bruce McCormack’s own reading of the two authors (Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology) shows that von Balthasar was wrong, despite Barth’s own views of his own readings.

Creeping Cultism

I recently shared a paper on epistemology to some Reconstructionists and Van Tillians.  I did not see myself as attacking Van Til, yet merely asking some technical questions on philosophy.  I thought I saw a weakness in a specific argument Greg Bahnsen made.  Mind you, I wasn't saying Bahnsen was wrong (in the broadest sketches I think he was on to something), but merely saying that one aspect is faulty, but if that aspect is fixed then the argument can probably be salvaged.

The response was ugly.   That shouldn't be surprising, since Recons really haven't done much in scholarship beyond the middle days of Gentry and Demar, and those two only wrote on two or three topics at most.  I suggested around this time last year that Christian reconstructionism was down for the count after the Doug Phillips sex scandal.   While Phillips himself wasn't much of a thinker and didn't offer any scholarship, he at least advanced Recon thought on a wide level.

Back to the paper.  Long story short, I was using several highly specific philosophy terms.  There is nothing intrinsically holy about those terms. It's just the current usage in philosophy.  These guys at this Facebook page didn't bother to understand these terms and merely started chanting reconstructionist slogans to each other.

One of these slogans was the Transcendental Argument for the Existence of God (TAG).  It says in order to know anything, you must presuppose God.  That's fine and that wasn't my beef.  My problem was that if we try to tie this to internalist models of epistemology, then the argument runs into problems (and there are HUGE problems with the argument beyond what I have given).

Yet these gentlemen seemingly identified their formulation of the argument with the argument itself, which meant any questioning of their formulation was a questioning of the argument.  And if the argument, so they perceived, seemed to fail, then all hope of knowledge was lost.

Of course, I had no such intention, but their reaction was quite telling and it is what you see in a lot of cults.  A questioning of one aspect of a beloved leader = criticism of Our Glorious Leader.

Which is a shame, since I love Greg Bahnsen.  But it gets worse.  The nature of the TAG argument is that without it knowledge is impossible.

Sadly, it gets worse than that.  They could not tolerate any deviation from the "formula."  Whenever the words of a theory become sacrosanct and beyond challenge, what you have is idolatry in its crudest form.

A light-hearted jest at TAG

I posted a reflection a small aspect of Van Tillian thought at a Reconstructionist page on facebook.  I wasn't even criticizing Van Til, but asking an epistemological question.  The firestorm that followed was....well...quite believable, actually.  As a general rule Reconstructionists do not read outside their fields and haven't discussed anything new in two decades.  Once they realized they were simply over their heads philosophically, the more abrasive ones backed off.

But I thought this should be fun.   The Transcendental Argument says if you don't presuppose the existence of God, knowledge is consistently impossible. I am not going to actually address that point.  A number of guys have offered devastating refutations of TAG (e.g., it proves Fristianity, the truth of the Pope, etc) The catch-phrase is this, The truth of the Christian Faith is the impossibility of the contrary.

Major Premise:  Jesus said with God all things are possible.
Minor Premise:  The contrary is a thing.
Conclusion:  The Contrary is possible.

Relax, it's a joke.

Is TAG a Variety of Internalism

TAG is the transcendental argument for the existence of God.  It asks (among other things) “What are the preconditions of intelligibility?” In other words, in order for you to have knowledge, what must be true?  Here we need to clarify that last clause.  Is the presuppositionalist asking, “In order for you to have knowledge, what must you account for to be true”?  This would make the argument thus:  how can your worldview account for logic, science, and morality?  

Knowledge as Justified, True Belief.

Without using all the religious-ese in the statement, it is another way of stating knowledge as “justified, true belief.”  This means that knowledge is I believe something to be true and am justified in that belief.  In other words, I have to give internalist (intellectualist) accounts for knowledge.  Greg Bahnsen clearly holds to this position.  He writes, “To put it traditionally, knowledge is justified, true belief” (Bahnsen 178).  He glosses justification as “sounds reasons (good evidence” for a belief.  At this point Bahnsen is in line with the traditional models of epistemology.

It seems, moreover, that the TAG-ist is asking the skeptic (or whomever; TAG works better on skeptics than it does on adherents of other theistic systems) to account for justifications (or preconditions) within his own worldview. Bahnsen writes, “The Christian claim...is justified because the knowledge of God is the context and prerequesite for knowing anything else whatsoever.  Furthermore, the unbeliever is asked to account for any “theoretical sense” of “any kind on the subject” (262).   It is here I suggest that Van Tillian presuppositionalism--at least in the extreme TAG variety--is a form of internalism.  

Justification seeks the satisfaction of epistemic duty.  Applied to the Van Tillian case, the person must fulfill an epistemic duty in order to have true knowledge; namely, the duty is to “establish the preconditions of intelligibility.”  Further, since it involves the formation of a belief, it is internal (hence, internalism).  Internalism also involves a view of cognitive accessibility (Plantinga 36), but this isn’t relevant to the above discussion.

The Gettier Problem

Edmund Gettier suggested a number of scenarios that show where someone can know something yet not really have justification.  A fourth criterion is needed.  For example, I look at a field in the early morning fog and see what I think is a sheep.  As it happens, it wasn’t a sheep but a wolf in sheep’s clothing.  Unbeknownst to me, there was indeed a sheep in the field behind the wolf.  Technically, I was correct.  I saw something in the field that I thought was a sheep.  It was true belief and I was justified in holding it, yet it wasn’t knowledge (Plantinga 32).  While this may not be the most powerful Gettier problem, the reader can consult here for more examples.

Externalism, by contrast, notes that many people have knowledge of situations s...z without being able to give ultimate justifications for their knowledge.  They would say, rather, with Thomas Reid and Alvin Plantinga, “ Any well formed human being who is in an epistemically congenial environment and whose intellectual faculties are in good working order will typically take for granted at least three things:  that she has existed for some time, that she has had many thoughts and feelings, and that she is not a thought or feeling” (Plantinga 50).

Conclusion

This paper does not try to show whether TAG is in fact false (I think it is).  Rather, that it rests upon improper foundations.  Furthermore, the challenge given by hard presuppositonalists (e.g., can you account for the preconditions of intelligibility? OR such-and-such thinker is in error because he did not challenge the unbeliever’s foundation) is itself a non-starter.  This paper, in conclusion, merely stated the view of externalism and did not seek to prove it to be true or false, as it is not used by TAG presuppositionalists.

Works Cited

Bahnsen, Greg. Van Til’s Apologetic: Readings & Analysis

Plantinga, Alvin.  Warrant and Proper Function.