Van Til's Limiting Concept

A challenging read.

Part of the difficulty of studying philosophy is that philosophers make extremely fine distinctions between concepts, usually in a foreign language we interact with via translation.

The more I learn about Van Til, the more intrigued I am by him. Kant… not so much.

I don’t know Van Til and want to read him soon.

I do have an appreciation for Kant because I actually see him as creating a framework that allowed Christianity to coexist during the Scientific Revolution. It is a framework that I used myself long before I knew of Kant. And, it is easy to see how Kant influenced Van Til. Even his distaste for the dialectic is a Kant thing. Kant defined the term as debate about things that could not be known and therefore sort of worthless. Van Til is sort of saying the same.

What I see Kant doing was drawing a line between what could be known and what cannot be known. While philosophers before him more took the position that if something could not be known, it should not believed (Descartes being the obvious example), Kant not only acknowledged that things could not be known but “gave permission” to people to believe them anyway. In fact, he went a step further and stated that it was good for society to believe in things that could not be known because it was in that realm that foundationalism rested, including objective moral behavior. In other words, while Kant was not a Christian, he most definitely believed in God.

So why was this significant? I think it probably gave Christians a tool to hold their faith when faced with new science that contradicted what they had been taught. I can imagine this was a very very big deal during Kant’s time. Even today, I think many Christians use that framework including myself. In other words, we can wall off some beliefs and say that regardless of what science may say now or in the future, those beliefs have to be based on faith.

I am to this day not sure how valid it is to have this separation between faith and reason. I am not sure how logical it is. Many would say it is very illogical. But Kant believed that it was logical and that is saying something since he is a top three philosopher of the modern age.

It would be interesting to have a discussion on whether the framework is valid for Christians or not. I don’t think that would be what Kant/Van Til would consider a time-wasting dialectic…

I don’t know Van Til and want to read him soon.

I heard someone say long ago that Greg Bahnsen is the one who made Van Til intelligible. So before you read Van Til, read Bahnsen, particularly Always Ready.

I am to this day not sure how valid it is to have this separation between faith and reason. I am not sure how logical it is.

I’m pretty committed to rejecting this separation, though I feel I have a ways to go to fully work it out in my own thinking.

The reason I want to reject it is that it seems to make faith irrational and to create the kind of upper story vs. lower story discontinuity Francis Schaeffer lamented.

Schaeffer’s take resonates with me because that kind of dualism seems to destroy the prospect of any kind of coherent system of truth…. which ends up with no useful view of truth at all.

So I should read Bahnsen on Van Til I guess… soonish.

In theory, there should be no separation. But here is the problem as I see it: if we try too hard to eliminate the separation, we end up with the Kent Hovinds of the word. In other words, we end up accepting bad and sometimes fraudulent thinking, trying to twist history, science, etc to match our faith.

The question I have to ask myself is whether trying to make faith rational does more harm than good. The creation debate is a good example. If one accepts far-out science from Christians trying to prove YEC because he thinks that faith has to be completely rational, what happens when that science is proven to be nonsense?

So, Greg, my solution is that Christians need to stop using science to try to prove supernatural events. And, we shouldn’t be surprised if science yields results incongruous to faith if we do.

For something to be rational, coherent, and logical, it must conform to God’s thinking and his wisdom. Faith is rational because (and if) it aligns with God and his revealed truth.

Greg,

Look, I agree we don’t need any more Kent Hovind’s, but what you dub “far-out science” trying to prove YEC is, I would guess, because your faith is divided between what the Bible says and what mainstream scientists say. “Science” is what it is, and we must attain to it. It is rational because God is rational. Faith is the height of rationality because it believes God!

there is quite a lot of ignorance about Van Til revealed on this thread. That is not a sin, but if a person hasn’t read Van Til it is best not to put words in his mouth. E.g., Van Til used the jargon of the idealists that he was taught at Princeton, which included “limiting concept” (which the article distinguishes well) and “transcendental.” However, Van Til disagrees with Kant on about everything. One only has to read his “God and the Absolute” in Christianity and Idealism to see this.

Van Til certainly would not separate faith and science. That would be the opposite of what he taught. He held that everything is revelatory, but that (proper) science is not possible outside a Christian-theistic framework.

Haven’t read Van Til. Heard his writing is wooden and awkward. Don’t really plan to read him; don’t care enough to. I’ve read Bahnsen and Frame on presuppositional apologetics, and that’s good enough for me.

Arguments about who is the “true follower” of Van Til (or, “insert theologian here”) are meaningless to me. The essence of presuppositional apologetics makes sense to me, and that’s enough. Jason Lisle’s “The Ultimate Proof for Creation” is basically a primer on this method, and he’s a follower of Bahnsen. Didn’t even mention Van Til.

Paul, if you are referring to me when discussing ignorance about Van Til, I plead guilty to knowing little about Van Til which is why I was discussing Kant, not Van Til. However, it appears to me that Kant did open a door to presuppositional apologetics or at least take a step in that direction from the earlier modern philosophers. Perhaps I am wrong but that is how it appears and a quick Google search indicates I am hardly the only one that thinks that. It seems to be an issue of some debate.

In regards to the issue of science vs faith and what you said about me personally, I really don’t know how to respond to that thought but I will say this. A person that accepts an issue by faith in God while knowing that prevailing science contradicts it is, in my opinion, exercising more faith than a person who needs some pseudo-science to prop up their faith in God.

I am not trying to be difficult. Just a few thoughts.

“The True VanTillian” debate is an interesting one for apologetic geeks. John Frame is typically accused of being a soft-presuppositionalist (along with a soft RPW‘ist … or whatever that should say). I found the Defense of the Faith to be hard to read, but like someone above said, Van Til is much easier to listen to.

I used you as an example, but I was not aiming specifically at you in my comment re. ignorance of Van Til. My apologies if I offended you. As for your Google search, it shows that many others haven’t read Van Til either. It has always astonished me that even well read scholars (e.g. Robert Reymond, Doug Groothuis, R.C. Sproul) misrepresent Van Til (and Bahnsen).

As for your second paragraph, well you now speak of “pseudo-science” in regard to (it appears) YEC, which is what I believe. I think you might provide some examples for me at least.

Finally, how are you defining “faith”?

Yes, the “true Van Til” thing is out there. I found it interesting that Lisle doesn’t even reference Van Til; he was influenced by Bahnsen (the second generation). Frame’ s “Apologetics to the Glory of God” was good, I thought. He’s softer than Bahnsen, though, to be sure.

[Paul Henebury]

I used you as an example, but I was not aiming specifically at you in my comment re. ignorance of Van Til. My apologies if I offended you. As for your Google search, it shows that many others haven’t read Van Til either. It has always astonished me that even well read scholars (e.g. Robert Reymond, Doug Groothuis, R.C. Sproul) misrepresent Van Til (and Bahnsen).

As for your second paragraph, well you now speak of “pseudo-science” in regard to (it appears) YEC, which is what I believe. I think you might provide some examples for me at least.

Finally, how are you defining “faith”?

Paul, if you can do it easily, I would like you to ask you to interact with my point about Kant and presuppositionalism. Do you really not see any connection between Kant and presuppositionalism? I am not saying that Van Til was a Christian version of Kant or believed much of what Kant believed. It just seems hard to believe that he was not influenced by Kant when you consider what presuppositionalism is and compare it to what Kant introduced.

Here is an example of pseudo science: trying to claim that carbon-14 dating is bogus because of a random mistake on some board in the past, when in fact, carbon 14 dating has been proven to very accurate. Or, trying to discredit carbon 14 dating while ignoring the other 30-40 dating methods that scientists use to date the earth that show the earth older than 6000 years.

I am not stating that science is rational or even grounded in correct metaphysics. I am not stating that YEC is false. I am not stating I don’t believe in YEC. I am not stating anything except that the example I gave is not an honest attempt at using science and is likely to do more harm than good when teaching YEC. By the way, the carbon-14 example I gave above was used by Ken Ham in that Bill Nye debate.