Confessor
Puritan Board Senior
Often unbelievers might use this answer when questioned by a presuppositionalist on why nature is uniform, or why universal, immaterial laws of logic exist, etc. (They might transform "that's just the way things are" into "it's inherent in nature"; the two are the same.)
Let me give an example I saw in Van Til's Apologetic (p. 322, n. 116):
Plato believed in a metaphysical continuum with unchanging Ideas (being) at the top and changing matter (non-being) at the bottom. The top was unity; the bottom was particularity. The top was generally "good"; the bottom was evil. Anyway, he thought that human life was somewhere between the two on the continuum, and that the mind of man was created by some "demiurge" in which the Ideas "moved down" the continuum.
But according to Bahnsen, since Plato has not rationally warranted why this demiurge occurred, his epistemology is at root arbitrary and therefore null. And apparently Plato realized that this was an error of his (he didn't use the excuse "that's just the way things are"); he therefore thought that maybe there was something to the gods all along.
Anyway, after I read this footnote, I immediately thought of a question someone could ask if a Christian were to object to Platonic philosophy as Bahnsen did: "Why does God exist?" (I actually have been asked this before, and I didn't know how to answer it.) If we answer, "He just does," then why can't an unbeliever say, "the demiurge just happened"? How much can the unbeliever say "just is"? How much can anybody get away with in saying "that's just the way things are"?
This question is crucially important in the context of presuppositionalism.
Let me give an example I saw in Van Til's Apologetic (p. 322, n. 116):
Greg Bahnsen said:That is, even if one granted Plato's point that the Ideas (forms) would have needed to organize or form the material realm in order to make the world of sense knowable, and then granted that it is knowable to human souls which, innately aware of the forms, are imprisoned in bodies, he has still given no rationale or explanation for why the Ideas (forms) or human souls ever became "incarnated" in the lower realm of time and space at all. Thus Plato's epistemology is ultimately arbitrary and rests on unwarranted assumption.
Plato believed in a metaphysical continuum with unchanging Ideas (being) at the top and changing matter (non-being) at the bottom. The top was unity; the bottom was particularity. The top was generally "good"; the bottom was evil. Anyway, he thought that human life was somewhere between the two on the continuum, and that the mind of man was created by some "demiurge" in which the Ideas "moved down" the continuum.
But according to Bahnsen, since Plato has not rationally warranted why this demiurge occurred, his epistemology is at root arbitrary and therefore null. And apparently Plato realized that this was an error of his (he didn't use the excuse "that's just the way things are"); he therefore thought that maybe there was something to the gods all along.
Anyway, after I read this footnote, I immediately thought of a question someone could ask if a Christian were to object to Platonic philosophy as Bahnsen did: "Why does God exist?" (I actually have been asked this before, and I didn't know how to answer it.) If we answer, "He just does," then why can't an unbeliever say, "the demiurge just happened"? How much can the unbeliever say "just is"? How much can anybody get away with in saying "that's just the way things are"?
This question is crucially important in the context of presuppositionalism.