Featured Presuppositional apologetics

This is the part of presupp apologetics that I struggle to understand or explain. Unbelievers can know facts and things, but only b/c they borrow from the Christian worldview and suppress the truth about God (Rom. 1:18ff). So yes they know things, but they have no way of accounting for what it is that they do not, not at least according to their worldview.

 

Yes... but they cannot account for it unless they borrow from the Christian worldview to which they suppress (knowledge of God). God is the precondition for knowledge. They suppress the knowledge of God, but when they know something they are borrowing from our worldview. Calvin referred to the sensus divinitatis as the means by which all humanity has access to knowledge. B/c we are image bearers, we are connected to God and thus have means to knowledge. The difference is how we account for what we know.

 

No... we know because our knowledge is analogical to God's. We can know something b/c God ordains all and knows all and we are in his image. Scientists know things b/c they are image bearers of God and thus have access to that analogical knowledge. The difference is, they cannot account for that knowledge in their worldview. The only way we could know or prove anything is if the Christian worldview is correct. In no other world or reality could there be any way to know anything. Therefore, since the unbeliever does know something, he is working with a Christian worldview of knowledge. Thus he is borrowing it. But he denies it and suppress the truth of God, his only access to account for knowledge. Thus he has truth but no way to account for it in his worldview of rationality/irrationality.

The transcendental argument of Bahnsen was that without the Christian worldview, there is no way to account for anything. Or the impossibility of the opposite to say it another way.

Here is a 15 minute lecture by Bahnsen that breaks down what I am trying to say.