The System, the Facts, and the Problem with Traditional Apologetics

Chapter 7 of my new book, The Folly of Unbelief, is titled “The System and the Facts”. In that chapter, I point out that the enterprise of  human knowledge can be seen as an attempt to bring system and fact together. The “system” is characterized by order, continuity, law-like regularity, relation, and unity. While the “facts” are characterized by disorder, change, individuality, and plurality. I argue that both these components—system and fact—are absolutely necessary for knowledge to obtain. Giving one priority over the other leads to problems. Facts without a system are unintelligible—they would be wholly discrete and unknowable without a system to relate them. However, a system devoid of facts lacks content and becomes empty and purely abstract, bearing no relation to the objects of knowledge. 

Thinking more about the relations between system and facts made me realize that a particular problem that traditional approaches to apologetics face can be expressed in terms of said approaches failing to balance the relationship between system and facts. Basically, traditional apologetics emphasizes factuality and neglects system. 

The traditional apologist aims to gather all the facts that he possibly can and dump them on the unbeliever. Let us assume that all the traditional arguments are successful. The traditional apologist presents the fact that the universe has a cause, the fact that a necessarily existent being is responsible for our contingent reality, the fact that the universe was fine-tuned for human life, and the fact that moral values are grounded in a perfectly good being. He may go on to present various historical facts and establish the fact of the resurrection upon the basis of those facts. He may present the fact of the reliability of the Biblical accounts and the fact of fulfilled prophecy. He presents all these facts and believes that he has built a powerful case for the Christian faith. 

But what is one to make of these various facts? The traditional apologist gives us no system to relate all these facts. All his apologetic provides us with are facts and more facts. The problem these traditional approaches have is not the presentation of facts, but the neglect of system. Giving priority to factuality over system in apologetics gives rise to a problem.

The problem is this: the faith we defend is a system. As Christian apologists, our goal is to rationally defend the Christian faith. But the Christian faith is a system of interrelated facts. The Christian faith is not just various facts mixed together, it is an interrelation of facts and a system of interpretation for those facts. The various facts of the Christian system are mutually dependent and mutually entailing. The problem the traditional apologist faces is that facts cannot prove or disprove a system. Rather, systems provide the context for the interpretation and intelligibility of facts.

To see this, consider a person who holds to a system which has as a foundational tenet the belief that Socrates is a god. Suppose such a person is presented with these facts: (a) that Socrates is dead, and (b) that gods don’t die. These two facts are meant to disprove the central tenet that Socrates is a god. But this cannot be achieved since one can just deny fact (b) and still maintain the system. Perhaps gods do die after all. The point here is that isolated facts cannot prove or disprove a system because a system can always interpret and relate facts in such a way that the coherence of the system is preserved. 

Because of the priority he gives to factuality, the traditional apologist inadvertently breaks up the Christian system into individual facts and tries to prove them individually. But even if he is successful in doing so he cannot couple them back up into the Christian system again. Removed from the context of the Christian system of truth the various facts cease to entail and relate to each other—they become abstract doctrines. Outside the context of the Christian system, the fact of the resurrection, for example, loses all significance and fails to prove the truth of Christianity. The fact of the resurrection, when taken out of the context of the Christian system, ceases to prove the deity of Christ, or that he is the Son of God and the second Person of the Trinity, or that he has paid for man’s sins. When he presents the fact of the resurrection, the traditional apologist is essentially presenting the unbeliever with a brute fact. 

When the traditional apologist merely throws the facts at the unbeliever without a corresponding system, what he does is give the unbeliever the right to interpret and explain those facts however he sees fit. By favoring factuality over system, the apologist never challenges the unbeliever with the Christian system. The unbeliever never sees the need to abandon his view of the world.  All the facts put together cannot prove the Christian faith because facts cannot prove a system. The unbeliever would utilize his own system and explain the facts accordingly. 

The conclusion is that the traditional approach to apologetics, even if successful, never establishes the truth of Christianity. And by this it is not just meant that the approach fails to prove Christianity with certainty. Rather, the approach fails to establish Christianity with any degree of probability. Why? Because of his insistence on the priority of factuality to the neglect of system, the isolated facts established by the traditional apologist can be interpreted by whatever system one decides to apply. This leads to relativism. The traditional apologist provides no way to adjudicate between competing systems. Appeals to theoretical virtues such as simplicity, etc. are useless since these virtues themselves are subject to the dictates of whatever system they are situated in. Christians must move towards an apologetic methodology that strikes the proper balance between system and fact.