Presuppositional apologetics is a brand of Christian apologetics popularized by the late Greg Bahnsen. It defends theism by contending that God is a necessary presupposition of the veracity of logic, the scientific enterprise, and morality. In this post, I will focus on the contentions on logic and reason, as these contentions are what make presuppositionalism especially distinct and rhetorically effective. Ironically, these contentions are based on faulty presuppositions and are a result of shoddy reasoning.
If one runs into a presuppositional apologist, as I have,a variation of the following questions will probably be asked: "How do you account for the existence of absolute logical laws that have governed mankind/reality for all time?" and "How do you know that reason is valid?". The apologist will often ask "how do you know that?" to whatever a person says with the aim of getting to talk (or getting back to talk) about these bedrock epistemological principles. Broadly, presuppositionalism contends that God is necessary to account for the laws of logic and the fact that human reason aims toward the truth.
First, let us examine the claims about logic. Presuppositioinalism argues that without God, the laws of logic would have no basis for their universal applicability(an essential feature of them). In order for this to be so, the laws would have to be referring to a transcendent entity, which like the laws themselves, are timeless and necessary (cannot fail to exist). In fact, the apologist would argue that the laws of logic refer to how God thinks. Thus, according to the apologist, because the laws of logic are referring to God's thinking process, we can account for logic's universal applicability.
I won't be articulating a robust philosophy of logic in order to refute the argument, however, I will expose three errors that the argument makes.. The first is that it assumes that there is no distinction between ontological realism and alethic realism. As discussed in my blog post "Reaction to William Lane Craig", "alethic realism contends that statements of a certain discourse have truth-values to them, while ontological realism contends that certain objects exist". One can affirm one realism and not the other. Using the same example from the post, one can hold mathematical statements, (such as 1+1=2), to be true or false without committing to the existence of numbers. With this distinction in mind, it's clear that an "object of reference" is not necessary to explain the laws of logic and their universal applicability.
The second error concerns the idea that the laws of logic "govern" over reality, which is the idea behind the alleged need to ground logical laws in a transcendent entity. If one takes this view seriously, then there are absurd consequences. Consider the Law of Identity. An example of this law in action is the necessary truth of the proposition "A cat is a cat". If we are to understand "governing" as the apologist does, then the Law of Identity governs over all cats so that this proposition is necessarily true, and, moreover, this law is actually how God thinks. This may seem to make sense, but consider the proposition "God is God". If the apologist's view is true, then the Law of Identity governs over God. This entails, on his own view, that God's thinking process "governs" over God, in the sense that it's the reason why "God is God" is true. This is clearly senseless and absurd.
Thirdly, understanding logical laws as the nature of God's thinking is deeply problematic. In my blog post "Encounter with William Lane Craig and the Kalaam Cosmological Argument" ,(yes, it seems I engage with Dr. Craig quite a bit), I argue that God can't be both timeless and a mind, since thinking/consciousness is necessarily temporal. If I'm right, then God's thinking can't be the reference point for logical laws, because that would entail that the laws of logic are contingent on time, which contradicts the fact that the laws of logic are supposed to be necessary.
But it gets worse. Even if we jettison a critical piece of classical theistic theology (that God is timeless, at least without creation), we still have a problem with thinking, because it doesn't seem that an all-knowing God needs to think at all. A person thinks to reach conclusions that they previously did not know, but this clearly can't be the case with an omniscient entity. An apologist may respond that God thinks, just not like us humans. Well, if this is the case, then God still can't be the reference point for logic because that would mean we humans never think logically! So, the attributes of both timelessness and omniscience preclude the laws of logic to be about God's thinking process.
With the problems of presuppositionalism's argument from logic exposed, let us move on to its related but distinct argument from reason. When an apologist asks "how do you know reason is valid?", he is attempting to make the case that one needs God to affirm that our cognitive faculties can discern truth. The argument is that without an all-powerful/all-good entity guiding a thinking agent's cognitive faculties, he cannot be confident in the validity of his reasoning, because it's not a guarantee that the faculties have been aimed toward the truth.
The main problem with this argument is one that was more or less articulated by Elizabeth Anscombe in response to C.S. Lewis, who was developing an argument along these lines. The objection is that the questioning of the validity of reason is in fact non-senseical, since in order to formulate the question one must apprehend the meaning of validity. Once this done, it is clear how discern whether one's reasoning is valid or not: analyze whether it conforms to the rules of logic.
"Truth" should get the same treatment as validity, though it extends beyond logic into the empirical. The point however, is that the meaning of these terms must be transparent in order to prevent them from being non-sense. The transparency precludes such radical epistemological concerns and undercuts arguments based on them.
The arguments from logic and reason are key parts of the presuppositionalist approach to apologetics. With the faultiness of these arguments exposed, presuppositionalism loses much of its force.
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