{"id":302,"date":"2011-02-10T21:09:00","date_gmt":"2011-02-10T21:09:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/johnbeckett\/2011\/02\/presuppositionalism\/"},"modified":"2011-02-10T21:09:00","modified_gmt":"2011-02-10T21:09:00","slug":"presuppositionalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/johnbeckett\/2011\/02\/presuppositionalism.html","title":{"rendered":"Presuppositionalism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

I am what the English majors in college called a \u201cbarbarian engineer\u201d (we called them \u201cunemployed\u201d). I took two philosophy classes: Introduction to Philosophy and Basic Logic \u2013 and that was thirty years ago. I\u2019ve done a considerable amount of reading in the social sciences as part of my religious and spiritual quest over the past ten years, but virtually none of it has been in philosophy.<\/p>\n

So I\u2019m very much out of my element when it comes to this topic I recently discovered. But it\u2019s the answer to a question I\u2019ve been asking for some time, and it strikes me as bad theology masquerading as philosophy, so I\u2019m going to dive in.<\/p>\n

By now everyone who reads this blog knows I grew up in a small, fundamentalist Baptist church. As far as I know, no one in that church had a college degree, including the minister. Education in general and intellectualism in particular were viewed with great suspicion \u2013 in many ways they were anti-UUs. In that environment, it was easy for me to understand how people could ignore the strong scientific case for evolution. <\/p>\n

But there are other, very intelligent, very well educated people who push \u201cyoung Earth\u201d creationism and a literal interpretation of the Bible. How? I\u2019ve heard plenty of people talk about a \u201cbiblical worldview\u201d but that struck me as simply ignoring inconvenient evidence. It turns out they\u2019ve created some very sophisticated philosophy to back them up. It\u2019s called \u201cpresuppositionalism<\/a>.\u201d <\/p>\n

Excuse me if this sounds I\u2019m telling you about this cool new thing called the internet. Although it appears this idea has been around since the 1920s, it\u2019s new to me.<\/p>\n

The basic idea goes something like this. There is no such thing as a neutral, objective worldview \u2013 all of us have \u201cpresuppositions\u201d about the way the world works. OK, that\u2019s a reasonable argument. But they go one step further \u2013 we puny humans are incapable of understanding anything on our own. If we know anything, it is only through the grace of God \u2013 who, of course, is the God of the Bible. And how do we know this? Because the Bible tells us so. Circular reasoning? No, the presuppositionalists get around that by declaring that the Bible is the Ultimate measure of Truth. <\/p>\n

The whole thing is far more involved and far more complex than this, but that\u2019s enough to make the point I want to make without boring you silly. Presuppositionalism comes out of Calvinism, which should come as no surprise \u2013 it reeks of \u201ctotal depravity\u201d and the \u201csovereignty of God\u201d (which, as I\u2019ve discussed before, is a misunderstanding of sovereignty<\/a>). You can\u2019t see why the Bible is self-evidently true? Obviously you\u2019re not one of the elect. Catholics and most non-Calvinist Protestants don\u2019t buy it either.<\/p>\n

It reflects a desperate yearning for absolute religious certainty \u2013 something that simply doesn\u2019t exist, at least not in honest religion. <\/p>\n

I am no fan of atheism and scientism, and I believe there is more to Life than the material world. But I have a strong respect for the scientific method. I believe what I believe because it matches my experiences of the world. Over the course of my life, I have developed theories about the way things work. When my experiences (which include reading and other second-hand sources, not just what I\u2019ve seen and heard myself) are at variance with my theories, I question the theories. When my experiences begin to show that my theories are wrong, I modify the theories. Over the years I\u2019ve had to give up some beliefs I really liked: some religious, some political, some personal. But it\u2019s so much easier to accept things the way they are instead of insisting they\u2019re the way I wish they were.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m sure my friends with better grounding in philosophy and theology have found plenty I\u2019ve oversimplified, but I\u2019m happy to at last understand the philosophical concepts behind the \u201cbiblical worldview.\u201d It won\u2019t help me debate them \u2013 we have no common ground to start from<\/a>. But it\u2019s good to understand.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a lesson here for all of us, best stated by legendary economist John Maynard Keynes: \u201cwhen the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am what the English majors in college called a \u201cbarbarian engineer\u201d (we called them \u201cunemployed\u201d). I took two philosophy classes: Introduction to Philosophy and Basic Logic \u2013 and that was thirty years ago. I\u2019ve done a considerable amount of reading in the social sciences as part of my religious and spiritual quest over the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1129,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nPresuppositionalism<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"I am what the English majors in college called a \u201cbarbarian engineer\u201d (we called them \u201cunemployed\u201d). 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