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Transcendental arguments usually seek to demonstrate that human experience (or a particular part of human experience) has, as a necessary condition, the existence of or the belief in something. The form of the argument is simply that “there must be something Y if there is something X of which Y is a necessary condition” 2 Robert Stern maintains that, strictly speaking, transcendental arguments are for a metaphysical precondition. He suggests that there are four common features in the metaphysical kind of transcendental argument. First, the claim is for a metaphysical condition usually arrived at a priori and obtains in every possible world. For example, says Stern, “existence is a condition for thought, as the former is metaphysically required in order to do or be anything at all.” 3 Second, transcendental arguments start with all or an aspect of experience. The argument proceeds from an experience (belief, laws of logic, intuition etc.) and inquires as to what the necessary con...

Before I read Van Til I didn't read apologetics very much. I did quite a bit of apologetics, but found reading it dull and not very useful. I couldn't get through reams of logic or piles of evidence without the realization that the next time I met a teenager with questions I would have no chance of even remembering what I had read let alone maintaining the attention of my interlocutor. Being committed to a presuppositional method I now lap up contributions on the subject. Here are a few I have read recently: God Is by Doug Wilson is a read-in-an-hour-or-two rough-shod ride over the pages of Christopher Hitchen's God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. It is a rewarding hour or two not least because it restores one's faith in the ability of Christians to write good, stinging prose and make a good argument (very few contemporary Christian writers can do both). Wilson's central and reverberating critique of the Hitch is that while he sounds like...

One wise professor once told me that to use Ludwig Wittgenstein in a paper was to invite derision. He evidently felt that Wittgenstein is so variously interpreted that one will always be wrong about what he meant. Another professor once told me that it was possible to write a paper without mentioning Cornelius Van Til. Possible, but, for this Van Tillian blogger, quite unlikely. So I offer some interaction between Van Til and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein is most commonly taken to be opposing a foundationalist theory of knowledge. He writes “Really 'The proposition is either true or false' only means that it must be possible to decide for or against it. But this does not say what the ground for such a decision is.” 1 While Wittgenstein might reach “the bottom” of his convictions, those convictions remain ungrounded. If he feels that he has reached the foundation of all his beliefs, he is confronted with the question of what kind of belief that m...

I exist. Am I sure that I exist? Well, as sure as I can be. I think I exist. Isn't that enough to assure me that I exist. If I am thinking, I must exist. And so goes the familiar logic of Rene Descartes. Descartes proceeds in his pursuit of knowledge from the following starting point: “When we apprehend that we are thinking things, this is the first notion which is not drawn from any syllogism; and when one says, I think, hence I am, or I exist, he does not conclude his existence from his thought as by a force of some syllogism, he must beforehand have known this major, All that which thinks is or exists.” 1 Descartes begins to know anything by knowing that he is thinking, he is self-aware. For Descartes, this assumption is the starting point to all other pieces of knowledge.