{"id":999,"date":"2026-07-06T13:35:05","date_gmt":"2026-07-06T20:35:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/?p=999"},"modified":"2026-07-06T13:36:21","modified_gmt":"2026-07-06T20:36:21","slug":"james-anderson-defends-van-til","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2026\/07\/06\/james-anderson-defends-van-til\/","title":{"rendered":"James N. Anderson Defends Van Til"},"content":{"rendered":"

In this entry I respond to Dr. James Anderson<\/a>‘s comments on a post of mine on presuppositionalism, God, Doubt, Denial, Truth: A Note on Van Til.<\/a> But first a redacted excerpt from a letter of mine to Anderson explaining my interest in the topic:<\/span><\/p>\n

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Thank you for your willingness to respond. I consider you to be the intellectually sharpest among the presuppositionalists. Why am I interested in the ‘presuppers’? (No disrespect intended, just a cute abbreviation.)\u00a0 Well, I am a philosopher of religion but I also have a long-term interest in transcendental philosophy. I wrote my dissertation on the ontological status of Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception, then followed the line down through the German Idealists, the neo-Kantians, to Brentano, Husserl, and Heidegger, who in Being and Time<\/em> (1927) re-ignites the Being question within the purview of transcendental philosophy. So I am interested in how the ‘presuppers’ fit into that tradition with their TAG (transcendental argument for God).<\/span><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I now turn to Anderson’s comments. My responses are in 14 pt:<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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I don’t think this [BV’s OP] quite captures what VT [Cornelius Van Til] has in mind. In context, he is arguing against the idea of a “neutral methodology” for evaluating truth-claims about reality (whether scientific or metaphysical). The underlying thought is that one’s theory of reality and one’s theory of knowledge must be coordinated; there is no metaphysically-neutral epistemology, no epistemology that is entirely indifferent to the nature and existence of God, the nature of the universe, the nature of man and his relationship to his environment, etc. <\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

BV: I agree that the theory of reality and the theory of knowledge must be coordinated. As Gustav Bergmann famously remarked, “epistemology is but the ontology of the knowing situation.” (Logic and Reality<\/em>, U. of Wisconsin Press, 1964, pp. 106, 324.)\u00a0 Nicolai Hartmann, in his Metaphysik der Erkenntnis<\/em>, 1921, is another who insists on the need for an ontology of cognition.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

To coin a slogan of my own, “The knowledge of being<\/em> (objective genitive) presupposes the being of<\/em> the knower (subjective genitive).”<\/span>\u00a0 So I agree with Anderson that “there is no metaphysically-neutral epistemology.” But he packs more into the quoted sentence\u00a0 than I do, as we shall see.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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Specifically, a “neutral methodology” (as VT conceives it) holds the pretense that human knowledge and reasoning are possible whether or not God exists<\/em>; thus the question of the existence of God is an open one from the outset, just like questions about the existence of black holes or Higgs bosons. <\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

BV: Here is where the disagreement begins.\u00a0 We agree that knowing is rooted in being and thus that epistemology\u00a0 needs to be grounded in ontology. In particular, the knowledge of being presupposes the being of the knower. But how do get from these propositions, which will be readily granted by most if not all philosophers, to the proposition that the knowledge of being presupposes the being of God? To say that there is no knowledge without an existing knower is one thing, but quite another to say that there is no knowledge without God.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It is important to realize than when Van Til and Co. speak of God they do not mean <\/span>just any old god, but the God of the Bible, indeed the triune<\/em> God of the Christian Bible with all of the Calvinist add-ons, and indeed some plainly Athenian extra-Biblical<\/em> add-ons as well, such as the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS)! Van Til claims to find Old Testament support for DDS, a claim I question in my\u00a0 Van Til on Divine Simplicity and the One and the Many<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

I grant that if<\/em> we are creatures of God, then<\/em> there is no human knowledge without God. For if we are creatures of God, then God exists, whence it follows that human knowledge cannot exist unless God exists. No doubt. But that is logically consistent with saying that no God exists. To affirm a conditional is not to affirm its antecedent.<\/span><\/p>\n

I think that Anderson will agree with me that God is not a being among beings, and is thus very different from a black hole, a subatomic particle, a planet, not to mention Russell’s celestial teapot and Edward Abbey’s angry unicorn on the dark side of the Moon.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Edward<\/span><\/p>\n

If God exists, he is not just one more thing that exists in addition to all the other things that exist. If God exists, then God is the metaphysical ground of the very existence of every contingent being, and indeed, of every being distinct from himself. This is not true of horses and teapots let alone of lunar unicorns and celestial teapots. If there is a lunar unicorn, then this is just one more isolated fact about the universe. But if God exists, then everything is unified by this fact: everything has the ground of its being and its intelligibility in the creative activity of this one paradigmatic purely spiritual being. The God question cannot therefore be reduced to the question whether the totality of beings includes a very special being, God, with very special properties.\u00a0 For i<\/span>f God exists, then everything other than God is a creature, which implies that everything other than God has an ontological status very different from the status it would have were God not to exist. We may call this status createdness <\/em>or creaturliness.<\/em>\u00a0 Accordingly, the mode of Being of creatures is createdness whereas the mode of Being of God is very different, call it aseity, from-itself-ness. Creatures exist in a dependent way or mode while God exists in an independent way or mode.<\/span><\/p>\n

I would say that God differs from every other being in (i) his mode of Being, (ii) his mode of necessity (he is not a necessary being in the same way that the number 7 is a necessary being, pace<\/em> Alvin Plantinga), and (iii) his mode of property-possession: he does not instantiate his attributes, pace<\/em> Plantinga: he is in some mysterious way identical<\/em> to his attributes. As St. Augustine says, God IS what he HAS: he has attributes by being identical to them.\u00a0 Van Til, as already noted, embraces the divine simplicity, although it strikes me as obvious that this is a Greek idea foreign to the Bible, and that therefore there is a tension between a strictly philosophical (Athenian) and a Bible-based (Hierosolymitan<\/a>) approach to God.<\/span><\/p>\n

If I am right, the question of the existence of God is not merely a question in special metaphysics (metaphysica specialis<\/em>) along with questions about the soul and the world as a whole. (Recall that Kant divides special metaphysics into three subdisciplines: natural theology, rational psychology, and rational cosmology.) It is also a question in general metaphysics (metaphysica generalis<\/em>) or ontology which concerns itself quite generally with ens qua ens<\/em>, das Seiende als solches<\/em> in its relation to esse<\/em>, Sein<\/em>. For again, if God exists, then the ontology of every non-divine being is different from the ontology it would have if God were not to exist.\u00a0 The existence of God has general-metaphysical (ontological) repercussions.<\/span><\/p>\n

The question, however, is whether the existence of God has epistemological<\/em> repercussions. If God exists, does his existence have implications for the nature and scope of human knowledge?\u00a0 The epistemological question is epitomized in Kant’s famous “What can I know?” To this we may add the question, “How do I know what I know?” If God exists, is what I can know and how I know it different from what I can know and how I know it if God were not to exist? Is it perhaps the case that if God were not to exist, we would know nothing at all? That may be the case, but one cannot just presuppose that this is the case.<\/span><\/p>\n

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VT [Van Til] reasons that if God exists (specifically, the absolute God of the Reformed Christian tradition) then all human knowledge necessarily depends on God. All creaturely knowledge is a kind of divine revelation; an analogical reconstruction of God’s definitive interpretation of his creation. As VT often put it, human knowledge is “thinking God’s thoughts after him.” A distinctively Christian metaphysics implies a distinctively Christian epistemology, in which case a “neutral” epistemology (if such were possible) would be a de facto<\/em>\u00a0denial of the Christian God. A method of inquiry according to which the existence of God and the existence of divine revelation are open questions is an\u00a0anti-Christian<\/em>\u00a0method. That’s what VT means by “to doubt God is to deny him” — or, as he puts it two sentences later, “Neutrality toward God is in effect negation of God.”<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

BV:\u00a0 <\/span>I grant that the conditional If God exists, then all human knowledge depends on God<\/em> is necessarily true. But how do we know that the antecedent of the conditional is true?\u00a0 That is the question. If we know that the antecedent is true, then we can apply modus ponens<\/em> to arrive at the knowledge that the conclusion is true. But how do we know that the antecedent is true?\u00a0 \u00a0If a conditional is true, it does not follow that its antecedent (or its consequent) is true. And as I said earlier, if one affirms a conditional, one does not thereby affirm its antecedent or its consequent. For example, to affirm that if Joe Biden is demented, then he is unfit for office, is not thereby to affirm either that he is demented or that he is unfit for office.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

One is of course free to presuppose the existence of the God of the Christian Bible with all the Calvinist and Athenian add-ons, but then one is arguing in a circle<\/em>.\u00a0 “We know that God exists because the existence of God is attested in the Bible which we know is true because it is God’s very Word.”\u00a0 \u00a0But of course this objection I am raising is ‘old hat’: Anderson has heard it hundreds of times.\u00a0 The question, however, is whether he or any presuppositionalist has a good response to it. I’ll come back to this point shortly.<\/span><\/p>\n

I will also point out that the penultimate sentence in the immediately preceding quotation is\u00a0 not true. It is not anti-Christian to consider\u00a0 questions about the existence of the God of the Christian Bible and about divine revelation to be open to investigation.\u00a0 It is neither anti-Christian nor pro-Christian. Suppose one is a committed Christian theist. Why is it anti-Christian for such a person to inquire whether there are good reasons (whether of a demonstrative or a non-demonstrative sort) to maintain his commitment? Did Thomas Aquinas display an anti-Christian bias when he set forth his quinque viae<\/em>?\u00a0 Obviously he did not.<\/span><\/p>\n

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All this to say, I don’t take VT to be offering or defending a transcendental argument here; if anything, he is simply assuming the transcendental necessity of God. He isn’t reasoning from epistemology to metaphysics, but rather from (Christian) metaphysics to (Christian) epistemology. The idea that there can be no religiously-neutral epistemology is one of the animating themes of VT’s entire philosophy (although not one to which he holds exclusive rights).<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Anderson’s first sentence displays a confusion of\u00a0 ‘transcendental’ with ‘transcendent.’ By definition, God is a transcendent<\/em> being: he exists whether or not creatures exist. If by ‘world’ we mean the totality of created beings, God is transcendent<\/em> in that he exists whether or not the world exists.\u00a0 Since Kant, we distinguish between transcendent and transcendental. The TAG argument is a transcendental argument in roughly Kant’s sense. But to explain this thoroughly would take us too far afield for a mere blog entry.<\/span><\/p>\n

Finally, something about arguing in a circle<\/em>.\u00a0 It is blindingly evident that one cannot prove a proposition by presupposing it. And yet Van Til and his followers are surely within their epistemic\/doxastic rights when they presuppose the truth of the their Bible-based Christian worldview together with all its Calvinist and Athenian add-ons. Maybe they are right! They go wrong, however, when they pretend to KNOW that they are right instead of humbly affirming that their worldview commitment\u00a0 is a matter of reasoned FAITH and living in this faith and the uncertainty that faith brings with it. So they make fools of themselves by making the sophomoric logical mistake of thinking that they can prove a proposition by presupposing it. It is as if their doxastic security needs are so overwhelmingly strong that they cannot tolerate the least bit of uncertainty.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Professor Anderson ends on an irenic note that suggests that he appreciates the difficulty of the Van Tilian position:<\/span><\/p>\n

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No doubt VT’s position is provocative, even for philosophers with Christian convictions. Whether his objection to a “neutral methodology” is cogent is a matter of debate. I offer these comments as an explanation rather than as a defense. Sufficient for the day is the trouble thereof. \ud83d\ude42<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In this entry I respond to Dr. James Anderson‘s comments on a post of mine on presuppositionalism, God, Doubt, Denial, Truth: A Note on Van Til. But first a redacted excerpt from a letter of mine to Anderson explaining my interest in the topic: Thank you for your willingness to respond. I consider you to … Continue reading “James N. Anderson Defends Van Til”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[143,192,1,194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-999","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-god","category-presuppositionalism","category-uncategorized","category-van-til-and-presuppositionalism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/999","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=999"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/999\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14246,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/999\/revisions\/14246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=999"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=999"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=999"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}