Transcendental Arguments
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is responsible for introducing the
term “transcendental” to philosophical discussion. Seeking to repel the
skepticism of David Hume, but unable to accept the methods of his rationalist
teacher Christian Wolff, Kant came to advocate transcendental argument as a new
means of grounding the certainty of mathematics, science, and philosophy.
All of us, he argued, must concede that knowledge is
possible. Else there is no point to any discussion or inquiry. Now, given that
knowledge is possible, said Kant, we should ask what the conditions are that
make knowledge possible. What must the world be like, and what must the
workings of our minds be like, if human knowledge is to be possible?
Kant argued that among the conditions of knowledge are the
transcendental aesthetic, in which the mind orders sense experience into a
spatio-temporal sequence, and the transcendental analytic, in which the mind
imposes categories such as substance and cause upon experience. So we know by
transcendental argument that the world (more precisely, the world of
appearances, the phenomena, not the world ‘in itself’) is a collection of
substances located in space and time, with causal relationships to one another.
We do not get this knowledge from sense-experience alone (Hume) or from
rational deduction alone (Leibniz, Wolff), but from an argument assuming the
reality of knowledge and showing the necessary presuppositions of that
assumption.
Transcendental argument became a staple of the writings of
the idealist school that followed Kant, and from there it made its way into
Christian apologetics. James Orr (1844-1913) employed it. But the twentieth-century apologist who
placed the most weight on the transcendental argument (which he sometimes
called “reasoning by presupposition”) was Cornelius Van Til (1895-1987), q.v.
Like Kant, Van Til was unhappy with empiricism and
rationalism, and with traditional ways of combining reason and sense experience
such as that of Aquinas. Kant found these approaches to knowledge logically
invalid. But for Van Til they were also wrong in a distinctively theological
way. Traditional methodologies applied to apologetics, said Van Til, assume
that human sense-experience and/or human reason can function adequately without
God, that is, “autonomously” or “neutrally.” So, at the very outset of an
apologetic argument, they concede the whole game. They adopt a presupposition
contrary to the conclusion they wish to argue. They seek to gain knowledge of
God by adopting a non-theistic epistemology.
The only alternative, Van Til argued, is to adopt a theistic
epistemology when arguing for the existence of God. But that approach seems to
be viciously circular: presupposing God in our epistemology and then using that
epistemology to prove his existence.
Van Til answered the charge of circularity in these ways:
(1) every system of thought is circular when arguing its most fundamental
presuppositions (e.g. a rationalist can defend the authority of reason
only by using reason). (2) The Christian circle is the only one that renders
reality intelligible on its own terms.
In defense of (2), Van Til developed his own transcendental
argument. He maintained that Christian theism is the presupposition of all
meaning, all rational significance, all intelligible discourse. Even when
someone argues against Christian theism, Van Til said, he presupposes it, for
he presupposes that rational argument is possible and that truth can be
conveyed through language. The non-Christian, then, in Van Til’s famous
illustration, is like a child sitting on her father’s lap, slapping his face.
She could not slap him unless he supported her. Similarly, the non-Christian
cannot carry out his rebellion against God unless God makes that rebellion possible.
Contradicting God assumes an intelligible universe and therefore a theistic
one.
But how can we defend the logical move from “intelligible
universe” to “theistic universe?” Van Til rarely articulated his reason for
that move; he seemed to think it was self-evident. But in effect, he reverted
at this point to apologetics of a more traditional type. Apologists have often
noted that we could not know the world at all unless it had been designed for
knowledge. If the world were nothing but matter, motion, time, and chance, we
would have no reason to think that the ideas in our heads told us anything
about the real world. Only if a person had designed the world to be known, and
the human mind to know it, could knowledge be possible. So Van Til at this point
reverted to a traditional teleological argument. He never admitted doing this,
and he could not have admitted it, because he thought the traditional
teleological (like the other traditional arguments) were autonomous and
neutral.
If Van Til’s transcendental approach is to succeed, however,
it must abandon the assumption that traditional arguments are necessarily
autonomous and welcome the assistance of such arguments to complete the
transcendental argument. The traditional arguments are in fact necessary to
establish the existence of God as a transcendental conclusion. And there is no
reason to assume, as Van Til does, that anyone who uses an argument from design
or causality is presupposing a nontheistic epistemology. On the contrary,
people who use these traditional arguments show precisely that without God the
data of our experience suggesting order and causality are unintelligible.
What, then, does transcendental argument add to the
apologist’s arsenal, beyond the traditional arguments? First, it presents a
goal for apologetics. The goal of the apologist is not only to show that God
exists, but also who he is: that he is the source of all meaning and
intelligibility in the universe.
Further, it suggests apologetic strategies somewhat
neglected in the tradition. Traditional apologists have often argued that
causality (for example) implies God. A transcendental argument makes a
stronger claim: that causality presupposes God. The difference between “implies” and “presupposes,” according to Peter Strawson and Bas Van Fraasen,
is that in the latter case God’s existence is implied either by the assertion or
the denial of causality. That is, not only does the existence of causality
imply the existence of God, but even to deny (intelligibly, if it were possible)
the existence of causality would be to invoke a framework of meaning that
presupposes God’s existence. Don Collett argues that the Strawson-Van Fraasen
kind of presupposition is identical with Van Til’s. So if creation presupposes
God, even the denial of creation presupposes him, and the atheist is like the
little girl slapping her father while sitting on his lap.
The Bible does make this kind of radical claim, that
creation not only implies, but presupposes God. For God is the creator of all,
and therefore the source of all meaning, order, and intelligibility. It is in
Christ that all things hold together (Col. 1:17). So without him everything
falls apart; nothing makes sense. Thus Scripture teaches that unbelief is
foolish (Psm. 14:1, 1 Cor. 1:20). There are many arguments to be made on the
way to that conclusion. Not every individual apologetic argument needs to go
that far. But the apologist’s work is
not done until he reaches that conclusion, until he persuades the objector that
God is everything the Bible says he is. That is to say that a complete argument
for Christian theism, however many sub-arguments it contains, will be
transcendental in character.
Bibliography
Collett, Don, “Van
Til and Transcendental Argument,”
Journal, forthcoming.
Frame, John, Cornelius
Van Til (Phillipsburg, N. J.: 1995).
Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Pure Reason, abridged, ed., tr., int. by Norman Kemp Smith (N. Y.: 1958).
Strawson, Peter, An
Introduction to Logical Theory (
van Fraassen, Bas C., “Presupposition, Implication, and
Self-Reference,” Journal
of Philosophy (1968): 136-152.
Van Til, Cornelius, The Defense of the Faith (