A Modest Defense of Basic Presuppositional Thought

I plan on writing a series of articles trying to explicate Presuppositional thought more concisely and clearly than I have found elsewhere. I plan on addressing some of the concerns that I think arise from those who have been exposed to Presuppositionalism via those who may be philosophically and theologically Presuppositional, but may not use the best debate or evangelistic tactics or strategy. If you think that Presuppositionalism just is forever appealing to the Bible as the ground of belief, or asking “By what standard/how do you know/how can you be certain” ad nauseum, then you likely have only been exposed to the kind of Presuppositional tactics that many of us find problematic. Those who employ that as a debate strategy may agree with me philosophically and theologically, but I have strong criticism of their presentation of such views. For this article, I would like to present a general justification for the philosophical conviction that underlies Presuppositional thought – that God is the necessary precondition for rationality, even for the unbeliever. Hopefully this will help demystify Presuppositionalism for some of you and help apologists understand a powerful tool that God has given his people in declaring Christ to a fallen world.

Many apologists are familiar with and use the moral argument for God. The most common form of this argument, popularized by William Lane Craig, goes as follows:

1. If God did not exist, the objective moral values and duties would not exist.
2. Objective moral values and duties exist.
3. God exists.

Now, for this article I’m writing expressly and exclusively for Christians committed to the truth of the historic Christian faith. Atheists and others are more than welcome to read, but here, I’m not going to be attempting to warrant the truth of the premises of this or any other arguments for God’s existence. So with that caveat out of the way, this argument is standard faire among Christian thinkers. While the atheist may protest to one or both premises, most of us do not therefore think that their protestation undermines the argument.

There are multiple defenses of this argument that arise in the face of various kinds of objections but one thing that we think is true as Christians, is that the unbeliever can do morally obligatory things because they are creatures created imago dei. We often will hear the objection from the unbeliever, "well are you saying that I can’t be moral? I dont need to believe in God to be moral!" to which the Christian will rightly point out the confusion between ontology and epistemology which the unbeliever has committed themselves to. There is no question that an atheist can do morally good things - we think they can precisely because they live in God's creation and are created imago dei. The argument then is not dealing with if religious belief is needed for people to do moral things, but rather what the necessary precondition is for the existence of objective moral values and duties to exist in the first place. That challenge then is if the worldview of the unbeliever can do the heavy lifting to ground their existence or not. So in one sense the Christian has everything in common with the atheist (we all are imago dei creatures) but in another sense we have nothing in common with the atheist (their worldview is irrational at its foundation because it denies the very thing needed to affirm what they want to affirm, and ours does not).

Why do I bring up the moral argument when talking about presup? I bring up the moral argument because it just is a transcendental argument. It argues what the necessary precondition would be for objective morality and then seeks to defend the impossibility of the contrary – that if God did not exist, it is impossible for objective moral values and duties to exist. This is just entailed by God being the necessary precondition (that if he was not, then the consequent would not be either.) And this is precisely how I, as a Presuppositionalist, would and do defend the transcendental argument from transcendental facts of reality (preconditions for rationality such as laws of logic, that there is something that is not nothing, consistency and coherence in the laws of nature, the intelligibility of nature, the reality of the past, truth seeking and reason responsive minds, etc.), hereafter TFRs.

So I give the following argument:

1. If God did not exist, then we could not coherently affirm TFRs
2. We can coherently affirm TFRs.
3. God exist.

From there I can show that in order to explain TFRs, a cause would need to be omnimax, multi-personal, necessary, transcendent, etc. That is, God. In addition that not only would alternative explanations not provide the necessary preconditions for rationality, but that any attempt to do so would be far less explanatorily powerful, less explanatory scope, more ad hoc and far less simple (as in most cases they need multiple explanations for any one feature). While I plan on reviewing objections from the unbeliever to the argument in later articles and how to overcome those objections, remember here the point is talking in house to Christians, which I take it almost a trivial truth that the overwhelming majority would accept the soundness of this argument that God is, ontologically, the foundational grounding for logic itself.

However, this logical version of the transcendental argument that I provided, as opposed to the moral version, since it is about the preconditions for rationality (laws of logic included) has one entailment that the moral argument does not. One does not use morality to evaluate the moral argument but they do use logic to try and evaluate the logical argument. This entails that in order to even engage the argument, God must exist as the ground reason for logic in the first place. That is, if the argument is sound, then the unbeliever is unwittingly presupposing the ground of logic in order to use logic. To use an old analogy, it is like they are taking a big breath of air before giving a speech on the non-existence of air. Yet this seems to be precisely where many apologists try to push for criticisms of Presuppositionalism.

What makes this so bizarre is that those same Christians who can easily answer the unbeliever on the moral argument when they retort “are you saying I can’t be moral because I don’t believe in your God,” are the same Christians who will hear the logical argument and say things like, "of course the unbeliever can reason! Are you saying that they cannot reason unless they believe in God?" Just like the answer above, which they themselves would give to the unbeliever’s criticism of the moral argument, the answer here is yes and no. The unbeliever can reason because they are created imago dei and live in God’s rationally ordered cosmos. But on the other hand, they cannot be rational about anything because their use of logic to try and reason against the existence of the necessary foundation for logic in the first place is inconsistent and irrational. That is, at the most fundamental level, their own worldview is incoherent. So when they use their reasoning to try and disprove God, if God is the necessary foundation for reason, then they are being utterly irrational - like taking in a deep breath of air before giving a speech denying the existence of air.

Now, the truth of the logical argument should be trivially obvious to you as a Christian. And then so too should the fact that in order for the atheist to even try to reason to the conclusion of the non-existence of God, they can only do so because God exists and they are created in his image. To be frank, I’m amazed that this is even in dispute among Christian. So the question then becomes, if you as a Christian believe that, then why wouldn’t we have our apologetics methodology reflect that? Why would we not point out to the unbeliever that even in their attempt to disprove God by attempted reasonable engagement of evidence and arguments, that they actually prove the necessary existence of God by using the very thing that God is a necessary precondition for?

Here I take it to be then the benefit of the Presuppositionalist position. It calls the unbeliever to be epistemologically self-aware of their own metaphysical commitments and where their attempts at rationality are at odds with their own worldview and are, therefore, irrational. This full frontal assault on the ability of their worldview to even allow for rational engagement has numerous applications to their understanding of God, his creation, his word, the utility of science, the quality, existence and role of evidences, and so forth. Presuppositionalists are therefore not opposed to evidences or the use of rational arguments. The main point of Presuppositionalism is that in order to evaluate an argument or to understand and interpret data in an evidentiary manner, the unbeliever must try and rationally engage with them. Yet as the argument above demonstrates, for them to even be able to attempt to do so, God just is the necessary precondition for rationality to even be possible. In order for them to argue against God, God must necessarily exist. And so the unbeliever is reduced to futility. They are foolish, in the Biblical sense – “The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God,’” (Psalm 14:1).

This will lead me to the next strength of Presuppositionalism – the Christian does not need to condescend to play on the turf of the unbeliever and prove God bottom up… but that can. (Because God exists.) I will discuss this in the next article.