Wednesday, December 29, 2021

Preliminary Thoughts on Van Til’s “Argument from Unity of Knowledge”

In his paper If Knowledge Then God: The Epistemological Theistic Arguments of Plantinga and Van Til (hereafter IKTG), Christian apologist James Anderson develops a total of seven arguments, three from Alvin Plantinga and four from Cornelius Van Til, which are intended to draw conclusions affirming Christian theism. What unites Plantinga and Van Til for Anderson is that “both have argued that a successful epistemology… must appeal to God at some point” and also that “a thoroughgoing adherence to naturalism (roughly, the view that there are no supernatural beings) is a recipe for debilitating skepticism” (IKTG, p. 2).

This is all very fascinating to me since, back when I was a believer, one thing that did stand out to me in my study of the Christian bible, is that it had next to nothing to say on epistemology. My guess is that Plantinga and Van Til were going off of sources other than what we find between Genesis and Revelation.