Dude, this Wikipedia page on Cornelius Van Til is so edifying whatttt. Started reading up on him after Josep sent me his apologetics material. I will now paraphrase the Wikipedia article… oh 21st century educational standards, thou art so low.
- “How do you argue with someone who has a different worldview?” Van Til concluded that there is no neutral ground on which Christians and non-Christians could agree, where the approach in philosophical issues epistemologically differs too greatly in interpretation between the camps (one holding the Bible as an authority, one dismissive of it). This was very contrary to the apologetics methods of his contemporaries.
- Going further, he reduced the non-Christians worldview into absurdity. They contradict their own presuppositions. How can you say you say murder is wrong when you don’t credit an absolute truth?
- The trinity is essential in Christian philosophy. It solves the problem of universals. John Frame: Pure unity with no particularity is a blank, and pure particularity with no unity is chaos. Blank and chaos are meaningless in themselves and impossible to relate to one another. As such, unbelieving worldviews always reduce to unintelligible nonsense. This is, essentially, Van Til’s critique of secular philosophy (and its influence on Christian philosophy).
Boss.
