How the Problem Presuppositionalism Addresses Is Not Real or Legitimate (3)

In my first post, I asked whether the problem of the mind-body dualism which Van Til accepts and incorporates into Reformed theology as presuppositionalism is a real or legitimate problem. Whatever else may be biblical and truly Reformed about his presuppositionalism, if that philosophical part of his so called “Reformed epistemology” is neither real nor legitimate, then surely it must be reconsidered as a doctrine which has gained so much influence among Reformed Christians today (see, for example, The Gospel Coalition’s embrace of Van Tilian presuppositionalism in their foundational document on truth, Can We Know the Truth? by Richard Phillips). What I will argue here is that the philosophical part of Van Til’s presuppositionalism depends on a problem that indeed is not real or legitimate and at best is too highly suspect or speculative to be compounded with Reformed theology (or what the Bible teaches), even if the intent behind such is to glorify all the more the sovereignty of God in salvation.

I begin by noting that the theoretical lineage from Descartes to Kant which assumes that mind and matter are so different that we have no assurance that they match up to convey reliable knowledge of the real world was not representative of other modern philosophers like Thomas Reid with his An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense. So such a proposal was not even in their time uncontested by other important thinkers. And prior to that there were philosophers like Aristotle and Aquinas who were aware of similar theories in the history of philosophy (such as with the ancient Greek skeptics) that in one way or other were skeptical of the mind and matter relationship and yet they did all their work with an assumption that there was no such problem. That is, if one were to ask them if they believed we should doubt that the mind can reliably convey what is actually out there in reality, they would have answered in the negative. They would have said that any theory that is skeptical of the mind and matter relationship as capable of reliably conveying truth is a theory that is false. In sum, they would have rejected any problem assumed to undergird such skepticism as neither real nor legitimate.

In Van Til’s time (the early to mid-twentieth century), there clearly was a trend among the philosophically minded to accept this dualism as a real problem as well as the epistemological idealism they saw as its answer. At the same time, however, there were British philosophers like G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell who made it their mission to counter such thinking to one degree or other. This project was taken even further by another British philosopher, J.L. Austin, who challenged the idealistic notion (from Descartes and his successors) that what we know directly are ideas or perceptions of things and not the things themselves. Now it wasn’t that Van Til didn’t know all this. He simply sized up the philosophical scene of his day and concluded (wrongly I believe) that the epistemological idealists were right.

However, what Van Til couldn’t have known is that in the latter part of the twentieth century (beginning with the early 1970’s) this epistemological idealism he had embraced for his presuppositionalism (what came to be known as “internalism” or “indirect realism”) would begin to fall significantly out of favor in the kingdom of philosophy and the latter domain would move more in the direction of epistemological realism (what came to be known as “externalism” or “direct realism”). Philosophers like William Alston, Alvin Goldman, and Alvin Plantinga ( to mention a few) have been formidable proponents of various versions of epistemological realism. Even as recently as 2015, respected American philosopher John R. Searle published Seeing Things as They Are where he labels the kind of dualism and epistemological idealism Van Til accepted for his presuppositionalism as “The Bad Argument: One of the Biggest Mistakes in Philosophy in the Past Several Centuries.” Basically, Searle makes the case that there is a mind and matter (or mind and body/brain) relatedness to external reality that explains why our minds can convey reliable knowledge of external reality. Such a scenario for knowing means that there is a difference between, for instance, a hallucination and a real experience. Though thoughts or ideas one may take to be real are common to both a hallucination and a real experience, a real experience has a physical or material relatedness involved in what it perceives that a hallucination does not. It is this relatedness that occurs in real experience that gives us the capacity to make statements that reliably correspond to what we experience in our world and give those statements a status as truth that a myth or fiction of some sort does not have. (Remember the apostle Peter’s claim: “We did not follow cleverly devised myths...but we were eyewitnesses.” — 2 Peter 1:16). The point is that Descartes, the father of modern philosophy, didn’t have the science we have today to show how the mind and brain relate. If he had, he would never have devised his theory that what we know directly are our ideas and only indirectly external reality itself. I add here, anecdotally, that in the late twentieth century when I was studying philosophy in the graduate program at Vanderbilt University, I once asked one of my philosophy professors, Dr. John Lachs (a former president of the American Philosophical Association) what he would say is the percentage of philosophy professors in our nation who have rejected the mind-body dualism or epistemological idealism one finds in the succession of Descartes to Kant.  He answered: “Over ninety percent.” However, let’s suppose that number is high and that we claim no more than that the modern theoretical assumption of a mind-body dualism is no longer the majority report among philosophers. What would that mean in this case? That based on what many philosophers believe in our time Van Til for his “Reformed epistemology” assumed as real and legitimate a modern problem for knowing that has now been largely discredited. That presuppositionalism with its implied perspectivism as an account of knowing no longer holds for many philosophers. Now does this not create a rather awkward situation? We have pastors and leaders in Reformed churches today who seem frozen in time. They are repeating dated and disproven notions about knowing, such as, when they claim there are no neutral, mute, or brute facts. In addition, all this gets mixed in with their Reformed theology, such as, when they claim that there is no Christ-honoring, common or objective ground of knowing for truth between a believer and unbeliever. It is, I say, as if such questionable, philosophical notions had the standing and integrity of unchanging, divine revelation which Scripture alone has—what those who are Reformed should be the last ones to ever affirm.