Presuppositionalism and The Transendental Argument for God

Presuppositionalism is a style of christian apologetics that draws inspiration from Calvinism, and is unique in that presupps, for the most part, employ a non-evidentiary type of argument. Rather, they try to get to god by reason alone and “presuppose” revelation as described by the Bible.

TAG, or The Trancendental Argument for God, provides their logical foundation and the late Cornelius van Til is viewed as the ‘father’ of this philosophy.

I know some of you are active over on the “Christian & Atheist Talk” group and you may have noticed that a few weeks ago, a dyed-in-the-wool presuppositionalist named David Lee Chu Sarchet began posting presuppositionalist material. It seems he brought in a few friends in as well but David is, by far, the most active.

Their style is a bit different than atheists are used to encountering, being it’s premises don’t rest on empirical evidence and are rather based on pure logic (or, I’d say illogic!). They tend to be very aggressive and accusatory, charging atheists as being immoral and liars. They honestly believe we all ‘deep-down’, believe there is a god whether we realize it or not. They claim people like us, who have a naturalitic world view, need to “borrow” from the christian world view in order to ground morality and logic.

If you have time, check out Sarchet’s posts. He follows the presupp playbook to a tee. He’s not that good though. I caught him saying something really dumb – something that undercut the very foundation of TAG and he simply refuses to respond to it. Or maybe he’s too proud to admit it. It’s really very funny : )

Hopefully, I’ll have enough time to begin writing some things down in the next few days about how to attack these guys – and attack we must because it’s important to keep them on the defensive. Their style depends upon being the aggressor. I’ll describe some chinks in TAG that can be exposed.

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