The Presuppositional worldview cannot justify its knowledge claims

In this debate, I will be supporting the contention that the Presuppositionalist worldview as expressed by Greg Bahnsen, and affirmed by my opponent, cannot know anything because of the fundamental presupposition that the noetic effect of sin has made mankind unable to trust their autonomous reasoning. Bahnsen states that: “What the apologist must endeavor to do is to demonstrate that without Christian presuppositions there is no intelligible use of facts and logic – that human knowledge and interpretation fail instantly. Therefore, to be reasonable at all, men must submit to the ultimate standard of God’s self-attesting word; to refuse to insist upon intellectual foolishness and eternal damnation. ” (1) In order to do this, I will examine the two means that Bahnsen gives for affirming our ability to know things; the self-authentication of scripture and of the personal experience of the Holy Spirit. Before continuing, by autonomous reasoning I will be using a definition that Kelly James Clark uses: “Let us define reason in terms of all human being’s truth-aimed cognitive faculties – reasoning , inductive, perceptual, aural, memory, and so on. ” (2) Contention 1: Self-Authentication of Scripture is insufficient At several places in Bahnsen’s written work, he appeals to what he calls the ‘self-attesting’ word of God. By this he means to place the written word of God above man’s own ability to autonomously reason (3). James Kelly Clark illustrates the biggest problem with this, when he states: “Here is the problem; Each person must decide (tacitly or explicitly) that a purported revelation is revelation. Each person must decide that what is being said in some particular holy writ is the voice of God. Each person must decide what is being said and then what it means. And each person must decide what it means today that God said something a long time ago. At every level, human reason is operative. ”(4) Contra Bahnsen, who states that the Bible is both clear and self-attesting, Clark points out that we must first decide what IS scripture and then decide what that scripture means! In fact, recent discoveries have confirmed the existence of apocryphal scripture (5). If we cannot trust our ability to autonomously reason, then on what basis can we dismiss the Infancy Gospel of James or other apocryphal gospels? We cannot determine which books are authentic without first trusting our ability to reason. Further, even supposing that the books of the modern Bible are authentic, we must remember that documents we have are not the original documents. This is a problem since there are variants in scripture, as one example I turn to Bruce Metzger who states: “Four endings of the Gospel according to Mark are current in the manuscripts. (1) The last twelve verses of the commonly received text of Mark are absent from the two oldest Greek manuscripts (א and B), from the Old Latin codex Bobiensis (it k), the Sinaitic Syriac manuscript, about one hundred Armenian manuscripts, and the two oldest Georgian manuscripts (written A. D. 897 and A. D. 913). Clement of Alexandria and Origen show no knowledge of the existence of these verses; furthermore Eusebius and Jerome attest that the passage was absent from almost all Greek copies of Mark known to them. The original form of the Eusebian sections (drawn up by Ammonius) makes no provision for numbering sections of the text after 16:8. Not a few manuscripts which contain the passage have scribal notes stating that older Greek copies lack it, and in other witnesses the passage is marked with asterisks or obeli, the conventional signs used by copyists to indicate a spurious addition to a document. ” (7) Further, as Michael Martin notes: “Are there other reasons to suppose that a Christian based epistemology provides no objective foundation for epistemology? A cursory glance at the controversies within the Christian religion must surely banish any illusion of the objective nature of Christian belief. The many sectarian and denominational squabbles, the numerous heresies, the schisms within the major churches shows that any certainty associated with Christian belief is nonexistent…. Furthermore, there seems to be no objective means of reconciling any of these differences. If this uncertainty and the lack of objective standards of reconciliation are found at the very heart of basic Christian doctrine, there seems to be small hope that the Christian religion can provide any objective foundation of epistemology in general. ”(8) Contention 2: Self-Authentication of the Holy Spirit is insufficient What exactly the revelation from the Holy Spirit is supposed to be is never made clear. It seems to be some sort of inner personal experience that leads the presuppositionalist to epistemic certainty. Supposing that such a thing happens, we are immediately confronted with two issues: Issue 1: Any such experience would require us to make a determination about the experience. What this means is that we have to first presuppose that we are able to trust our reasoning with regards to any sort of experience. If we cannot trust our own ability to reason then how can we trust any conclusions about the experience? What it was, what it means, or whether it is true or not are all activities that we have to engage our reasoning facilities with. In a personal correspondence on Sye Ten Bruggencate Facebook wall Sye, a person that Hezekiah has expressed support for, says the following with to the question “How can you be epistemically certain that God has revealed himself to you? ”: “Because He Has revealed Himself in such a way that we are certain of it”(9) Aside from the explanation of how the presuppositionalist can be certain that it was God who gave him this revelation OR what this revelation actually is, the problem remains, whatever revelation that Sye (or Hezekiah) has experienced will have to be interpreted by his cognitive facilities. Issue 2: Even accepting that divine revelations occur, there can be no doubt that false revelations happen as well. Take the case of Dena Schlosser (10), a lady who chopped off her child’s arm because she believed that God told her to do so. Does Hezekiah believe that Dena’s experience was genuine? If the revelation experience is supposed to transmit certainty, then it would appear that there can be no method to distinguish between a false revelation and a true revelation because the only method available would rely on us trusting our cognitive faculties. Make no mistake; Dena is not an isolated case (11). Conclusion: The two methods that aid in our efforts at trusting our reasoning that Bahnsen gives us are deficient to provide us knowledge apart from autonomous reasoning. Both of the methods presuppose that we can reason autonomously since both of Bahnsen’s methods require us to interpret what constitutes scripture and what a revelation from the Holy Spirit is. What this means is that in presupposing that we cannot trust our autonomous reasoning we have given up any chance at knowledge. Who else but us? As Clark says: “But surely I am the one who decides what is true or false. Who else could do that for me? Of course, our deciding does not make something true or false; that is not my point. My point is that each of us must make decisions using our best judgment about what is true and false. ” (12) References: . http://www.debate.org...