Starting Point

Layer upon layer

Brick upon brick

Precept upon precept

Worldviews are established

If there is an errant starting place the rest of the structure will be faulty. The house built on the sand collapses in a storm. The house built upon the rock stands firm come what may. Regardless of the foundation the building will be built even if it is not long supported. Jesus used the analogy of a house upon sand and a house upon the rock. In His parable the house built upon the rock was the person whose foundation is Christ. The house built upon the sand was the person whose faith was in something else that was not a firm foundation of truth.

What I am getting at is that our first principals, our foundational beliefs about life, anchor all that follows even if that anchor is not secure. If the Judeo-Christian God is the foundation of all truth then it logically follows that all truth flows from that reference point. This means, science, history, morality, philosophy etc. all flow from the starting point of Him. He is the bedrock in which all else is supported.

If, instead, there is no god, then all there is is the natural world: the only way we can know it is to trust our own subjective reasoning being certain of nothing including science, history, morality, philosophy etc.

Either way everything hinges on the truth of the existence or non-existence of God. If the Judeo-Christian God is real then it is logical for all knowledge to be aligned with His truth. If He is not real and there is no God than all knowledge would need to bend to that reality. Or rather would be an extension of that reality. However, I think some great bending and distorting of reason and logic is taking place to support the philosophical position of the non-existence of God. Moreover, the foundations of reason and logic collapse when God is removed from the equation.

Jacques Derrida the famous postmodern philosopher writes about how all of language is meaningless signs with no signifiers if God doesn’t exist. He says that we cannot even be certain about lingual communication for we have no anchor for language if there is no God. Ironically he authored quite a few books. In one of his books he laments reason to be the one thing he can’t get around. He knows it should not exist in a world with no God, and yet, he can’t even reason that to be the case without employing reason. Just the same logically he sees that reason is not supported any better than language if there is no God. He said it is a conundrum he couldn’t get around.

In contrast C.S. Lewis wrote in Miracles, “It is thus still an open question whether each man’s reason exists absolutely on its own or whether it is the result of some (rational) cause – in fact, of some other Reason. That other Reason might conceivably be found to depend on a third, and so on; it would not matter how far this process was carried provided you found Reason coming from Reason at each stage. It is only when you are asked to believe in Reason coming from non-Reason that you must cry Halt, for, if you don’t all thought is discredited. It is therefore obvious that sooner or later you must admit a Reason which exists absolutely on its own.”

Worldview Thinking

I have been on a journey into the world of presuppositional apologetics. This field of philosophy/theology is about examining our basic foundational assumptions about life. Everyone has them whether they have ever thought about them or not. I have participated in discourse with atheists who claim that their belief system has been proven, and thus they made no assumptions or steps of faith in solidifying their worldview. No one can honestly make this claim. Not even the Christian. Somewhere the buck stops. Somewhere truth has to be self evidencing. Meaning if I am trying to prove a matter I have to prove the matter before that and before that and on into infinity. Somewhere truth, in order to be truth, has to stop at something that just is—something that gains its truthfulness not from another presupposition, but from the thing itself. Therefore, the discipline of presuppositional apologetics is about looking at worldviews from the top down instead of from the bottom up.

We ask questions to get people thinking about how they think. We point out that the very reason we can reason is that God is. We start at the place of God’s existence and illustrate how all else makes sense through that paradigm or worldview. In this way it is shown that other worldviews fail to make sense of the world, and how they all borrow from the Christian worldview to bring a semblance of validity to their belief system. This is usually unintentional, but happens just the same. If Christianity is the worldview that gives the most adequate foundation for life then it follows that any other worldview has some of its truth contained within or else it wouldn’t be plausible enough for anyone to believe it.

Apologist, Joe Boot puts it this way, “We must be willing to get to the foundations of our experience. If we remain content to decorate the interior of the house of knowledge and pay no attention to the structure and foundation stones of that house, we will find that the dry rot of absurdity and the rising damp of unexamined assumptions are fatal to the structure.”

Many people assume worldviews that are not livable. Postmodernist philosopher Jacques Derrida wrote an entire book about how language had no meaning as it could not point to anything beyond itself to gain its meaning. He used language to communicate how language cannot communicate. How absurd is that? The same philosopher says that any reader can interpret what is written according to their own worldview. He goes on to say that one should consider the author dead and not worry about what the author may have meant when writing the book. However, Derrida wrote another whole book explaining his previous book when people misinterpreted his arguments in the prior book. Apparently he expected people to have interpreted his book in the way he meant it and not in the way they chose to interpret it.

C.S. Lewis writes in Mere Christianity that a man can say he disbelieves in morality until someone steals from him and then he is the first to cry that an injustice has occurred, thus appealing to the moral law he previously denied.

Albert Einstein wrote that he was a moral relativist, but could not live like one if he wanted to get along in the world.

There are so many examples of contradictions between worldviews and practical living. These same people would have their practical lives come crashing down if they actually lived out their foundational presuppositions about life. If Derrida truly wanted to maintain his foundational beliefs he would have never been able to share them with anyone because they could never be communicated. In contrast, Renee Descartes, who is famous for his conclusion “I think therefore I am” remained in bed until he had resolved himself to the fact of his existence by acknowledgment of his own thoughts. He understood there was no point in going through the actions of life if he wasn’t yet sure of his existence.

There are certainly some foundational beliefs we are grateful people don’t actually try and live out for this benefits the rest of society. I have read of people who believe that there is no moral law and no difference between stepping on a beetle and killing a person. I would not advocate that they try and live this practically, but that they realize the impossibility of that belief system.

To borrow from Joe Boot, ones worldview must be able to give an adequate explanation for science, logic, morality and language. It must answer questions of origin, purpose, morality, and final destiny.

Apologist Ravi Zacharias rightly advocates that ones worldview must be logical, livable, and transferable. In other words, it must make sense philosophically, work practically, and have the ability to be communicated to another.

We must learn to think about our worldviews and not simply continue plunging blindly into life with no consideration for our basic foundational beliefs. We must not live lives in a place of complacent contradiction. It’s time to examine our foundational principles and confirm them or change them to line up with truth. Socrates always lamented that “the unexamined life was not worth living.” I believe that he realized that how we live is directly related to how we think.

Conversely, when Jesus called for man’s repentance he was speaking not only about a heart change, but a mind change, for the word literally means “to change the way you think.” Our thinking must line up with reality. That reality has been revealed through the person of Jesus for He said of himself that He is the Truth. Truth is personified in the person of Jesus. Hence, it can be personally known and experienced. Truly, when we examine our way of thinking we must do so in light of truth. We must compare our way of thinking to the Truth and alter ours to His when we find a discrepancy in the way we think. The way we live will follow when our thoughts follow His.

Being Precedes Knowing

There always seems to be this great divide between secular knowledge and the knowledge of the things of God. Soren Kierkegaard’s philosophy lent itself to create a schism between faith (religious knowledge) and reason (secular knowledge). He posited that it was satisfactory for the two to contradict for the one need not be rooted in the other in a coherent fashion. Prior to this time period, philosophers searched for a unified world view to explain all of reality. They presupposed a unified reality and attempted to develop a worldview that corresponded to it. Yet Kierkegaard decided to divide knowledge into two streams avoiding the conflict altogether. Henceforth, presuppositions began to change. It was allowable for reason and science to diverge from faith and science began to be supreme over the religious world. Man became the measure of all things. Man’s reason was supreme and autonomous. Science was the discipline by which man could attain knowledge and that science was disengaged from God’s truth as man studied the world to learn about man and not to learn about God.

Eventually, man got disillusioned by the quest for reason and began to posit that it’s all meaningless. Man is no longer the measure of all things, for there is no measuring stick. There are no standards by which to measure. Postmodern philosophers such as Derrida, Focualt, and Rorty began to suggest that all of life is textual and can be analyzed linguistically and found meaningless. There is nothing to support philosophy, science, history, language. There is nothing behind it, they claim. Its support structure has been pulled out from under it because knowledge has nothing that it can rest upon to gain its meaning.

Unless, of course, God really does exist and as James Sire writes in Naming the Elephant, “we can understand the universe because an understanding God made it to be understood.” Or like John Henry Newman says, “Religious Truth is not a portion, but a condition of general knowledge.” Thus God must precede knowledge. Being must come before knowing. God must be in order for language, history, science, art, music, and life to have any purpose at all. Otherwise we are only blobs of matter, so to speak, as the evolutionist maintain. Or as the popular atheist, Richard Dawkins, laments we are merely “dancing to our DNA.”

We know deep in our souls that there is more to life than being meaningless collections of cells dancing to our DNA. We know that we have purpose as we are on a journey looking for that purpose. We value life, because God gave meaning to our lives. Our value comes from Him and all of our desires, hopes, and dreams come from Him. We can know this world around us because He has made it knowable. In Him we live, and move, and have our being.

Moreover, in Christ we find the fulfillment of all life. John 1:3 says, “Through Him all things were made; without Him nothing was made that has been made.” He is the author of all creation and the only way to learn about that creation is through His Truth. Faith and reason are inseparable for it is all rooted in Him and when we try and divide it is when we create great errors of thinking. All of life must be measured through Him and cannot be disengaged from His Truth. It is only possible to know anything at all because God exist. He is the one we need to know in order to see all else clearly.

C.S. Lewis rightly puts it this way, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”