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Can Muslims and Jews Use TAG?

When I began getting a better grasp of Presuppositional Apologetics and transcendental arguments, I started running into a little problem. Whenever I would apply the transcendental argument against unbelief, often times I was met with some variation of this objection: “well I see no reason why a Muslim or a Jew or any of the other monotheistic religions couldn’t use the same argument you’re using to prove their own god” The issue wasn’t that I thought the objection was forceful. My standard approach was to point out that, although they resemble Christianity in some ways, at the points where these religions disagree with Christianity they begin to fall into the same philosophical problems that non-theistic worldviews fall into.  Now, don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with this approach. However, this objection got me thinking about what’s going on in the background whenever we engage with some unbelieving worldview.  Whenever we engage an unbeliever, we are engaging a variety of
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Does The Universe Have Any Meaning?

One of the deepest philosophical questions that has plagued human thought for ages is whether or not our existence has any meaning. There is the existential form of the question that is concerned with whether there’s a point or purpose to our existence. However, there is also the epistemological form of the question that is concerned with whether the universe is meaningful and can be known or understood. It can be argued that the two forms of the question cannot be divorced from each other, but let’s focus on the epistemological form for now. First let us think about what meaning means. What do we have in mind when we say something is meaningful? To understand this, we must understand the difference between denotation and connotation . In linguistics, denotation refers to the literal or dictionary meaning of a word or expression while connotation refers to the underlying ideas or emotions associated with the word. When we talk about meaning, we are usually referring to connotation. Whe
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What a Mathematics Course Can Teach You About Transcendental Arguments

Some time ago, I was taking a Mathematics course and we were dealing with Set Theory - particularly the set of Real Numbers. I won't bore you with the details, but we were talking about the axioms of addition, multiplication, binary operations, etc. And basically, all it was was the abstract foundation of the ordinary basic arithmetic that we do. In the middle of the lecture, what crossed my mind was how abstract all of it was. When people do ordinary addition or multiplication, they do not have all this abstract set theory in mind. And this thought drew my mind towards the distinction between the a priori and the a posteriori, timeless logic and temporal facts. Just because we can posit some axioms, prove abstract theorems, and deduce certain general truths, it does not mean that it would be useful in our ordinary contingent experience. It was a clear illustration of Van Til's argument that there needs to be a way to bridge the gap between logic and fact. The unbeliever doesn&
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What Is “The Impossibility of the Contrary”?

If one has studied Presuppositional Apologetics even a little, one would no doubt have come across the phrase “the impossibility of the contrary”. But what does it mean? Well, obviously it means that the contrary is impossible. But what is the contrary and in what sense is it impossible? And if it is impossible, what significance does that have to our apologetic approach? Logically speaking, two propositions are said to be contraries if they cannot both be true. For example, the propositions ‘I am currently in Athens’ and ‘I am currently in Barcelona’ are contraries because they cannot both be true at the same time and in the same sense. Contraries, though, can both be false. Contradictories, on the other hand, are propositions which always have opposite truth values. In other words, A and B are contradictories if whenever A is true, B is false, and vice versa. The phrase “impossibility of the contrary” should rather be called “impossibility of the contradictory” if we are being techni
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The Battle of Presuppositions

OBJECTION : "Logic, uniformity of nature, causation, a mind-independent reality, reliability of sense perception, etc are merely presuppositions of my worldview. They are properly basic and do not need to be justified. We both presuppose them so why do you need to add an extra entity (i.e. God)?" This kind of objection is encountered rather frequently and is used by unbelievers who have been faced with the insurmountable difficulty of answering the presuppositionalist's questions about these things. But there are three problems I'd like to point out with such a response.  First, it is incredibly naive to think that one can just posit these things without a broader worldview in which they can be made intelligible. Sure, they may be presuppositions in a sense and as such more basic than other beliefs. But without a metaphysical background to give them meaning they are, to use Van Til's terms, just rocks in a bottomless ocean. There needs to be a hard place where the
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The Exclusive Nature of Christian Theism

As human beings, we are wired to think in generalities. To know particular things, we usually place them in broader, more general contexts. We try and see the qualities a thing shares with other things, and through a process of abstraction, we create classes and general categories. Abstraction is an integral part of human thought. So it is no surprise that when it comes to the question of the existence of God, philosophers have applied the process of abstraction. Van Til taught that abstract reasoning is the hallmark of non-Christian thought. What he meant by this was that unbelievers would always think in general terms so as to avoid dealing with the concrete claims of Christian Theism. So, for example, they will speak and argue about God in abstraction. Not the Christian God in particular - not Yahweh - but some vague sense of “god”. A lot of philosophy of religion is done in abstract. “Naturalism” and “Theism” are conceived in abstraction. By reasoning abstractly, the unbeliever nev
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The Authorial Analogy & The Problem of Evil

One of the most important philosophical and theological questions we can ask is about God’s relation to the world. There are various ways to think of God’s relation to the world, and the way we prefer would have an impact on our view of God. The Bible itself is fond of the use of analogies to help us understand God’s relation to the world. So there is biblical warrant for the use of analogies. The analogy I think is the best is the authorial analogy. The authorial analogy frames God’s relation to the world as the relation between an author and his story. So God is the author of this story called history. I won’t go into the reasons why this analogy best explains God’s relation to the world in this article (there’s a really good article explaining that here ). That’s because in this article I want to highlight the authorial analogy’s strength in dealing with objections to Christianity - specifically, the Problem of Evil. The Problem of Evil has been a topic of debate in philosophy of re
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