Van Til, part 2 (Disk 22)
MY NOTE: Here Knudsen gives a very
complex answer to a question asked before the audio started.
Van Til does not have the aversion to
antinomie that Dooyeweerd and Vollenhoven. An antinomie will have a
logical contradiction in it, but more than just a contradiction. It
arises due to a transgression of the bounds of the cosmos. Van Til
has never used the principle of the exclusion of the antinomies.
Some say Van Til did not have a workout
idea of the boundary as Dooyeweerd and Vollenhoven did. But Van Til
did have a strong creator/creature distinction. MY NOTE: this
boundary may be implicit but not explicit. It is also in his view of
revelation.
Is Van Til closer to Bavinck?
According to Van Til, yes and Van Til is closer to Stoker than
Vollenhoven and Dooyeweerd.
Van Til does not develop the idea of
the cosmonomic structure that Dooyeweerd and Vollenhoven have.
MY NOTE: picking up from disk 21 here:
The idea of the concreteness, all of
the items are present from the very beginning. The concrete idealist
was one who was aware of the context in which he was starting and
have everything there from the beginning and see everything in its
unity and aware of its presuppositions. Hegel introduced time into
logic itself in an attempt to overcome Kantian's notion of the thing
in itself. Van Til says they failed in this attempt.
The idealist says the God of theism
must be replaced by the absolute. Van Til questions that and he
admits that the idealist is correct in the idea of the unity of
thought and being. He (the idealist) is correct in rejecting
pragmatism and the idea of ultimate contingency. However a close
examination the concrete idealism shows that its presumed absolute
cannot embrace all of the facts and remains abstract. Absolute
idealism degenerates into pragmatism and pragmatism has already show
to be impossible.
Van Til is quite content to insists
that Christianity is a rational belief and has grounds for it and is
content to enter into argument and we begin with experience (MY NOTE:
not sure what he means here).
There is a certain formal agreement
with idealism in that there is value in the concrete approach as far
as identifying presuppositions and he says that it is impossible to
argue directly for God. If you argue directly for God you are doing
what the idealists does, that you have to be able to get an
idea/essence of God before you can use it as a principle of
interpretation and that you have it under control.
For Van Til the transcendental argument
is negative argument. You have to presuppose God (the God of the
Scriptures) and apart from whom your experience in unintelligible and
that would include this notion that if we have presupposed God we are
no longer in the situation where it is incumbent on us to define God
before we can use God as the ultimate principle of interpretation.
All of our thinking has to presuppose the creator/creature
distinction.
If there is any predication at all you
we have then to be able to unite, to gain a meaningful unity of our
experience but apart from Christianity there is no meaningful unity,
then we are left with brute, uninterpreted fact.
A form of the argument (as Knudsen has
interpreted it) that if you abandon the true transcendent viewpoint a
process is set into motion in which one shows that he can get a
unitary view of things. Bavinck argued along these lines. If you
miss then the true God of the Scriptures, you are bound to worship
the creation rather than the creator.
Van Til has attempted to construct a
consistent reformed apologetic. He has moved then into a line of
transcendental argument. What does that mean? There will be this
negative type of argumentation, we argue for the impossibility of
contrary. If then one loses the transcendent standpoint and we cannot
get a unified position and this inability is an indirect proof of the
true starting point.
If you are going to have an apologetic,
you must have a point of contact (anknupfunspunkt). The
expression in Romans 1 of having known God. The knowledge of God and
of ourselves are correlate. We are always in a position of accepting
the revelation or we suppress the revelation (covenant keeping or
covenant breaking). We are either obedient or disobedient. There is
no tertium quid. All these things are involved in Van Til's
idea of the analogical relationship between God and man.