When Charles Darwin wrote “On the Origin of Species” in 1859, he employed an ingenious trick to persuade people of evolution. He linked evolution to natural selection, implying that natural selection was the mechanism of evolution. This was a clever trap because when something false (evolution) is linked with something true (natural selection), people are often fooled.
Our critic this week is Dr. William Lane Craig, a philosophy professor and Christian apologist. Although Craig defends Scripture in some areas, he adamantly denies literal (6-day) creation in favor of the big bang and secular timescale.
Our feedback this week once again comes from Peter who is still convinced that I have misrepresented the presuppositional method. Peter claims that (1) all forms of circular reasoning are fallacious and (2) that the presuppositional method as advanced by Bahnsen and Van Til does not involve any circular reasoning.
Our critic this week, Peter, is not a critic of Christianity. Rather, he has criticized my previous article in which I show the difference between vicious (arbitrary) circular reasoning and virtuous (rationally necessary, or “spiral”) circular reasoning. Peter has an unargued philosophical bias that all circular reasoning is wrong / fallacious, and that the presuppositional method used by Bahnsen and Van Til does not employ circular reasoning.
We previously covered the Münchhausen trilemma: an argument that knowledge is impossible because it can never be ultimately justified. Any (true) belief must be based on a good reason in order to be considered knowledge. But the reason is only good if it also is based on a good reason, which is based on a good reason and so on.
Knowledge begins with God (Proverbs 1:7). But what is the mechanism by which we reason to have knowledge of other things? How does our knowledge that the “sun is bright” depend on revelation from God? By what chain of reasoning are we able to know anything about anything? How do we prove our most basic, foundational belief?