Presuppositionalism Quotes

“Deny that the Bible is, without any qualifications, the very Word of God, and you are left without any ultimate standard of measurement and without any supreme authority. Grant that the Bible is a Divine revelation and communication of God's own mind and will to men, and you have a fixed starting point from which an advance can be made into the domain of truth.”
― Arthur W. Pink

“Those who hold to the Christian faith see law as an ultimate order of the universe. It is the invariable factor in a variable world, the unchanging order in a changing universe. Law for the Christian is thus absolute, final, and an aspect of God's creation and a manifestation of His nature. In terms of this, the Christian can hold that right is right, and wrong is wrong, that good and evil are unchanging moral categories rather than relative terms.

From an evolutionary perspective, however, we have a very different concept of law. The universe is evolving, and the one constant factor is change. It is impossible therefore to speak of any absolute law. The universe has evolved by means of chance variations, and no law has any ultimacy or absolute truth. As a result when we talk about law, we are talking about social customs or mores and about statistical averages. Social customs change, and what was law to the ancient Gauls is not law to the modern Frenchmen. We can expect men's ideas of law to change as their societies change and evolve. Moreover, statistics give us an average and a mean which determine normality, and our ideas of law are governed by what is customary and socially accepted.”
― R.J. Rushdoony, Law and Liberty

“For theologians groaning under the oppression of demands to justify their discipline before the bar of what is supposed to be universally valid scientific method the appeal of non-foundationalism is immense. It liberates a celebration of the rights of particularity. It enables the theologian to say that theological method must be different from other methods because it shapes its approach from the distinctive content with which it has to do - just as, indeed, other disciplines shape their approaches in the light of their distinctive content. Non-foundationalism, that is to say, is a way of advocating the autonomy of distinct intellectual disciplines.”
― Colin E. Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation, and the Culture of Modernity

“The unbeliever attempts to enlist logic, science, and morality in his debate against the truth of Christianity. Van Til's apologetic answers these attempts by arguing that only the truth of Christianity can rescue the meaningfulness and cogency of logic, science, and morality.”
― Greg L. Bahnsen

“Therefore, the authority of Christ and His word, rather than intellectual autonomy, must govern the starting point and method of his apologetics, as well as its conclusion. He challenges the philosophical adequacy of the unbeliever's worldview, showing how it does not provide the preconditions for the intelligibility of knowledge and morality. His case for Christianity, then, argues from the impossibility of the contrary. From beginning to end, both in his own philosophical method and in what he aims to bring about in the unbeliever's thinking, the Christian apologist reasons in such a way "that in all things Christ might have the preeminence" (Col. 1:18).”
― Greg L. Bahnsen

“Van Til's presuppositional approach: (a) locating his opponent's crucial presuppositions, (b) criticizing the autonomous attitude that arises from a failure to honor the Creator-creature distinction, (c) exposing the internal and destructive philosophical tensions that attend autonomy, and then (d) setting forth the only viable alternative, biblical Christianity.”
― Greg L. Bahnsen

“Van Til's insight… was that antitheism actually presupposes theism. To reason at all, the unbeliever must operate on assumptions that actually contradict his espoused presuppositions — assumptions that comport only with the Christian worldview. The unbeliever's efforts to be rational and to find an intelligible interpretation of his experience are, then, indications that he bears a knowledge of God the Creator within his heart, though struggling to suppress it (as the Bible itself speaks of sinful man's condition)”
― Greg L. Bahnsen

“Apologetics involves a conflict over ultimate authorities — that is, a conflict over our presuppositions or final standard. What should be the source of a person's presuppositions? For the unbeliever, it will be some authority for reasoning other than the word of God, while for the believer it is God's revelation.”
― Greg L. Bahnsen, Van Til's Apologetic: Readings and Analysis