Bertrand Russell Refutes Cornelius Van Til

Lecture 2, of "Theological Epistemology" Course

Sep 04, 2024

∙ Paid

In talking to non-Christians, many Christians are tempted to think they have to appeal to Bible verses in order to argue for Christian conclusions. In their reading, listening, and watching, they are careful only to let their worldview be shaped by Christian sources. Believing that Christianity is true, they are tempted to treat it as the only truth.

Cornelius Van Til’s presuppositionalism encourages this error. Van Til, professor of apologetics at Westminster Theological Seminary in the mid-20th century, argued that all arguments on behalf of Christianity had to begin from explicitly Christian or biblical premises. All natural theology, or philosophy or science, intended to point toward God or objective morality - all had to be rejected for starting from natural things as if God did not exist.

Van Til even went so far as to say that mathematical and scientific knowledge could not be had apart from a biblical worldview. How? Don’t unbelievers, when they add two and two, still get four? Well, Van Til avers, they don’t know “2 + 2 = 4” as they ought to know it, in relation to the God who is both three and one and who created and sustains even mathematical truths in being.

Van Til’s goal was to think as a Christian without any hold-over ideas from secular philosophies. However, Van Til’s whole system of presuppositional apologetics fails at exactly that point. It is utterly indebted to the very philosophy Van Til studied in his PhD at Princeton: British Idealism.

Famously, Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore founded analytic philosophy with their rejection of British Idealism. And so, in this lecture, we’ll consider how Van Til did actually hold to a great many philosophical views, and how Russell and Moore refuted idealism decades before Van Til began to write.

If you’re interested to learn how philosophy can shed light on contested questions of Christian theology, you’ll want to subscribe to get access to this lecture and the rest of the lectures of this course, “Theological Epistemology.”