Gary discusses the newest book project for American Vision: The Great Debate: Does God Exist?
Because of the great success of modern scientific and technological achievement, Western civilization has tended to discount metaphysical questions. Instead, our mind-set is more toward the sense-oriented, empirical scientific method. You must recognize this default bias of modern man because you need to respond to it.
You have been learning a lot about worldviews. You are now seeing that to justify logical reasoning and to validate human experience, you will have to operate self-consciously in terms of a complete worldview—including not only epistemology (how we know), but metaphysics (what is the nature of reality) and ethics (how we should behave). Despite modern naïveté, you cannot have an epistemology without a metaphysic, for your theory of knowing must be compatible with your theory of reality. This will be the unbeliever’s downfall, as we will see.
In this chapter we are ready to outline the general procedure for defending the faith. Although the prior studies may have raised the uneasy concern that apologetics is too philosophical and sophisticated, you will learn that it is actually quite simple. And apologetics is especially simple when employing the presuppositional method because you are not required to learn every fact of human experience “just in case.”
Nor may the unbeliever skirt the issue by declaring, “We are working on it.”The presuppositional method deals with issues that must exist prior to the facts, for the facts to be known and used. Therefore, you will have the apologetic tools to answer all forms of objections from all types of people at all times. Van Til expresses this remarkable nature of the apologetic method:
When we approach the question in this way we should be willing to start anywhere and with any fact that any person we meet is interested in. The very conviction that there is not a single fact that can really be known unless it is interpreted theistically [i.e., with reference to God] gives us this liberty to start anywhere, as far as a proximate starting point is concerned…. We can start with any fact at all and challenge “our friends the enemy,” to give us an intelligible interpretation of it.
All facts speak of God’s existence, for Acts 14:17 declares that God “did not leave Himself without a witness.”
Pushing the Antithesis
Pushing the Antithesis consists of twelve chapters that include study questions, an answer key, a glossary of terms, and a comprehensive bibliography. If you want to be equipped to present the truth of the gospel in a compelling way, then Pushing the Antithesis is required reading.
Buy NowGary discusses the newest book project for American Vision. The Great Debate: Does God Exist? is at the printers and is an expanded and explained transcript of the historic 1985 debate between Dr. Gordon Stein and Dr. Greg Bahnsen. This debate is a classic of presuppositional apologetics and still stands as the ultimate example of showing that God’s existence (and immaterial things :) is not only logical, it is absolutely essential.