Students in the Real World, 3-3

The second kind of apologetics is presuppositionalism. This approach refuses to assume unbiblical first principles as the starting point and make the case for the faith on that basis. Instead, presuppositionalism debates these first principles as well as the very idea of first principles, and commends divine revelation as the necessary foundation for all thought and knowledge, showing how it authenticates itself and destroys all opposing views.

This approach is vastly superior to evidentialism. It engages the unbeliever on a whole other level. Since evidentialism stands on an irrational foundation, the best that the Christian can do with it is to show that he is less irrational and that the non-Christian is more irrational. But it cannot provide positive information about anything or justification for any claim. If it is used at all, its function is negative and its result is partial. On the other hand, presuppositionalism reaches the very foundation of rationality and knowledge, and the principles and contents of necessary truths.

However, before we continue, we must make the distinction between pseudo-presuppositionalism and biblical presuppositionalism. This is because there is a school of thought that calls itself presuppositional apologetics, but in reality it begins from non-biblical presuppositions, so that it possesses none of the advantages that apply to true presuppositional apologetics.

Pseudo-presuppositionalism affirms that many of the intellectual tools that the unbelievers use are indeed rationally sound, including sensation, intuition, induction, and science. However, two problems arise when they use them. First, although these intellectual tools reliably perform their expected function, the unbelievers cannot account for them, and cannot provide rational justification for them. Second, without divine revelation to provide the controlling intellectual principles or presuppositions, the unbelievers will misuse these tools, so that they will permit and produce false conclusions.

There are in turn two fatal problems with pseudo-presuppositionalism.

First, its adherents embrace intellectual tools and ideas that are inherently irrational, so that even if they first hold to divine revelation as their foundation, they still cannot justify or account for them. Thus it remains that these tools and ideas will permit and produce false conclusion no matter what. And it follows that to introduce them into their worldview is to poison the entire system.

For example, while confronting the unbelievers and even the evidentialists, they marshal all kinds of arguments against the certainty of empirical investigations. Although they do not say that sensations cannot provide knowledge at all, they do insist that the unbelievers cannot account for their reliance on their sensations, and that their sensations at least sometimes deceive them.

But after they have asserted divine revelation as the necessary precondition for all knowledge, they never proceed to offer a precise demonstration on how it accounts for a reliance on sensations or the belief that our sensations provide a basically reliable way to obtain knowledge. They simply assert that it is so, and at times they would even throw around several biblical passages that they claim to support their view without actually showing their relevance or showing that they indeed prove what they claim that they prove. They likewise fail to account for or justify intuition, induction, and science, among other things.

Second, not only do they fail just as miserably as the unbelievers in justifying or accounting for their reliance on sensation, intuition, induction, and science, they even admit that these irrational ways of knowing and reasoning are necessary in order to discover the contents of divine revelation. In other words, although they claim that it is revelation that accounts for, say, our sensations, our sensations are what allow us to access revelation in the first place.

The result is not just one vicious circle disintegrating into a mess of confusion and nonsense, but worse than that, they have placed themselves in the exact position of the unbelievers – they make themselves and their own human investigation the center and precondition of all knowledge. They explicitly place revelation under sensation, intuition, induction, and science. And in many ways, this is even worse than even an explicitly anti-Christian philosophy that has enough sense to question irrational epistemologies.

It is futile to assert that this system of thought consists of a web of beliefs rather than a self-destructive circle. The idea is only plausible if sensation can indeed access revelation, and if at the same time revelation indeed affirms the reliability of sensation. Since they cannot demonstration the latter, the former remains unaccounted for and unjustified. Thus there is no self-sustaining or self-justifying "web" at all, since the various points within this so-called web is in fact hostile to one another.

Therefore, pseudo-presuppositionalism presents a mere smokescreen against the unbelievers — its confusion is its only strength. And it leaves as its legacy one of the greatest embarrassments in the history of Christian thought. To our disappointment, this is also the predominant school of presuppositionalism. It makes strong claims and it has numerous followers, but in reality it makes the Christian faith no less vulnerable than any other irrational worldview, since its very foundation is anti-Christian irrationalism.

It makes a presuppositional critique of evidentialism, but in the end it makes the very principles of evidentialism its own epistemological starting point. It thrives on the willingness of believers to think that they are submitting all their thoughts to Christ without having to truly question their commitment to anti-biblical principles. Like evidentialism, it is unbiblical, irrational, impractical, and also hypocritical. However, as with evidentialism, there are indeed more than enough irrational and gullible unbelievers in this world for it to attain some measure of success. In addition, the great confusion that it generates can often cause unbelievers to hesitate before realizing that the whole approach is nothing more than self-contradictory nonsense.