[Note: this blog has been moribund for some time. It had strayed too far from philosophy and waded into politics (just one of its faults). These days I have other outlets for that material and can reserve this for my musings just on philosophical matters which don’t fit on those other sites like Navigating the New Normal. Hence this blog will be devoted to the problems of philosophy and closely related areas, no more. I don’t expect these posts to “go viral”; I write them nevertheless because they are useful in clarifying my own thinking, and I can only hope they will help others who happen to stumble across them.]

Presuppositionalism is the idea that belief in God — or unbelief (belief in something else) — is a starting point of reasoning, not a conclusion. Realize this, and things change.

Belief in a God is a posit — or it isn’t (because materialism is your posit, or because something else is). Posit is just another word for starting point. One then deduces what follows: ontologically, epistemologically, experientially, ethically.  

Classical arguments for God’s existence get this wrong, because they try to prove that God must exist based on reasoning either from more basic first premises or from evidence of some kind (e.g., an appearance of design in nature). Naturally, all such efforts have failed in the sense that none have proven decisive. None have convinced critics who continue with rebuttals that aren’t unreasonable.

(One would think Christians would find this troubling: such efforts all make human reasoning epistemically more basic than God — in the Cartesian system, God is assigned a role kind of as an afterthought.)

Not that evidence is totally irrelevant. It just can’t be made decisive, in the sense either of deductive closure or inductive strength.

In the case of the former, there remains a logical gap between “proof” of a creator and the claim that this creator is the Christian God.

In the case of the latter, there remain significant disanalogies in addition to this gap.

Hume, in his celebrated Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, had little difficulty showing that prevailing design arguments of his time did not prove the existence of an all-powerful designer, just (at best) a designer with sufficient power to achieve the observed results.

Not to mention the problem of seeming (from our perspective) flaws in the design: the problem of evil, the evidence of massive suffering of individual creatures built into the design as they prey on one another ruthlessly in the lifelong quest for food.

Presuppositionalism refuses to worry over this. You either begin with God or you don’t. If you begin with God, you deduce that it’s His universe, and He could design it in any way He sees fit. Including curse it in response to the disobedience (sin) of the first humans (Genesis 3:14-19).

It does not compel belief in God. A materialistic naturalist can be a presuppositionalist who tells you that he begins with a different posit or starting point, that’s all.

Presuppositionalism is a methodology, not a metaphysics or an epistemology or an ethics (of belief or conduct). It can be thought of as containing these, as part of a larger perspective. It counsels that you identify and clarify your starting point, but leaves open what your starting point is or ought to be. One can take the Kierkegaardian “leap” and set that logical gulf aside … declaring, with Kierkegaard (in his Philosophical Fragments, Book III) that once you’ve set aside all your reasonings about design, etc., with all their dangers, God just emerges. Or you could go with, say, Pascal’s Wager. Or, by contrast, one can retort with the scientific positivist types that these are silly and maintain, “There’s no evidence!”  

How does presuppositionalism differ from presuppositional apologetics, the theology developed during the last century by thinkers such as Cornelius Van Til and Greg Bahnsen? Presuppositional apologetics maintains that denying God results in intellectual incoherence; God, whose essence includes logicality and morality, must exist as a grounding of human logic, coherent experience, ethical decision-making.

If everybody accepted this argument, there would be no atheists, and that’s our distinction. Again, we have an argument that gives logical and epistemic priority to human reasoning (it’s sometimes called the transcendental argument for God’s existence), and it fails to decide the issue for all who are thinking rationally about it.