Presuppositions Quotes

“Most people catch their presuppositions from their family and surrounding society, the way that a child catches the measles. But people with understanding realize that their presuppositions should be *chosen* after a careful consideration of which worldview is true.”
― Francis A. Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture

“There is a flow to history and culture. This flow is rooted and has its wellspring in the thoughts of people. People are unique in the inner life of the mind -- what they are in their thought-world determines how they act. This is true of their value systems and it is true of their creativity. It is true of their corporate actions, such as political decisions, and it is true of their personal lives. The results of their thought-world flow through their fingers or from their tongues into the external world.”
― Francis August Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture

“We all - whether naturalists, atheists, Buddhists, or Christians - see the world through the grid of an interpretive framework - and ultimately this interpretive framework is religious in nature, even if not allied with a particular institutional religion.”
― James K.A. Smith, Who's Afraid of Postmodernism?: Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church

“Modernist discourse [...] incorporates semantic devices - such as the labeling of theism as 'religion' and naturalism as 'science' - that work to prevent a dangerous debate over fundamental assumptions from breaking out in the open.”
― Phillip E. Johnson, Reason in the Balance: The Case Against Naturalism in Science, Law Education

“...you cannot enter into an investigation with a philosophy that dictates the outcome. Objectivity is paramount; this is the first principle of detective work that each of us must learn. It sounds simple, but our presuppositions are sometimes hidden in a way that makes them hard to uncover and recognize.”
― J Warner Wallace

“The relationship of the Phenomenology to the rest of the systemis as an entrance exam. It is a test for those who have presuppositions about the world that they are unable to suspend, in order to begin with Hegel’s Logic and follow the development of thought that is unfolded there. The Phenomenology charts alternative perspectives on how we know the world and demonstrates the inadequacy of all of them. For this reason, Hegel calls this discussion ‘the pathway of doubt, or more precisely as the way of despair’ (PS, p. 49).”
― Thom Brooks, Hegel's Political Philosophy: A Systematic Reading of the Philosophy of Right

“We don’t define faith as an intellectual exercise where we either make ourselves believe (which is make-believe), or else we interpret the physical evidence while “holding to the right presuppositions.”
― Petros Scientia, Exposing the REAL Creation-Evolution Debate