I recently got into an exchange with a classical apologist, Spencer Hawkins. So, the credit goes to him. Here’s how it went:

“1) Your first move is to shift the burden of proof. You make the claim that ALL non-Christian worldviews are logically impossible,”

i)The issue is that to propose a question-begging claim. To say that it is possible doesn’t show it to be possible. From the Christian perspective, my God is the measure of what is and is not possible. You even say later “I can imagine the Christian God not existing without running into a logical contradiction”. This may satisfy you, but I don’t think of my intuitions that highly. I think we often place our ability to think up things as a measure of coherence. You don’t even try to factor how intuition is often wrong. I could imagine a world in which Islam is true. The issue is that Islam has internal contradictions that make it completely incoherent. Let’s conceive of a world in which a man goes back to kill himself before he grows up into the depressed and rage-filled man he is today. This is fine and dandy, but absolutely incoherent. The man in this possible world both grows up and doesn’t grow up at the same time and same place. You see for humans what is conceivable isn’t necessarily possible. Humans are limited and shortsighted in our scope. God is not in the same position.

ii) It is called the transcendental challenge for a reason. This is an obligation the Christian and Non-Christian both have. We and every human being should have a worldview that grounds the necessary precondition of intelligibility. I have no burden to shift.

iii) I think it is irrational to say that some vague unknown worldview has all the answers in order to escape the refutation of yours.

‘yet you (to quote from your own blog) “act as though you don’t need to prove it… [which] makes conversation nearly unbearable and completely useless.” ‘

Unlike Dr. Flowers, I have met the burden of proof and sent you something on the issue. It also makes the mistake on your part to assume that Dr. Flowers and my claims are proven in the same way.

“2) Of all non-Christian worldviews, you claim: “these ‘possible’ alternative worldviews that you speak of will never be sufficient but will at one point or another be arbitrary, inconsistent, and incoherent.” OK, prove it! Arbitrarily lumping them into two groups — the Christian WV, and all non-Christian WVs — doesn’t help to establish that ALL of the possible alternatives are inconsistent and incoherent. You actually need to argue for that point.”

I have reformulated the disjunct and that is quite helpful to my argument. The presumption is that one must inductively refute every contrary worldview. This is a false presumption, as you can’t ground a transcendental conclusion in inductive inference. It isn’t false to point that at the base that all unbelieving worldviews are united at the base in rejection of the Christian worldview. I don’t know how that is arbitrary. You also seem to think that TAG is identical to the internal critique.

“3) Your third response is burden shifting, again.”

That isn’t a shifting of the burden if everyone has that burden. That is why Bahnsen attacked neutrality. He understood that we are simply taking deep metaphysical, ethical, and epistemic principles for granted. Presuppositionalism is the art of giving no more freebies in philosophy and accounting for notions of moral obligations, logic, etc. in one’s worldview. If a worldview can’t account for the preconditions of intelligibility, then why accept it? The point of these criticisms is that you are fine with an incoherent move in order to save Non-Christianity. If you wish to accept that near irrational fideism, then Presuppositionalism has done what it was designed to do. It reduced the opponent to absurdity and you have presented the Christian worldview.

“At one point you claimed that revelation from the triune God of Christianity is “self-attesting.” In what sense? I can imagine the Christian God not existing without running into a logical contradiction. Something that is self-attesting is tautological, true by definition, and necessarily true. Christianity is not, or so it seems to me. It could be false. As Paul says, If Jesus didn’t rise from the dead then Christian faith is in vain. If this is even a possibility, then Christianity is not logically necessary. And so, this brings us squarely back to whether or not TAG is sound. Which you haven’t proven. “

i) The Bible is self-attesting in the sense that it is the ultimate authority. You have nothing further or higher on the epistemic chain. It is that the justification of the belief is in the object of the belief itself.

ii) I think you are reading into Paul. Was he really giving us a statement about modal logic? I think Paul is saying that if Christ did not rise from the dead, then we end up in a meaningless existence. He spoke about Nihilism before Friedrich Nietzsche! But Nihilism is irrational and therefore Christianity is true in Paul’s mind.

iii) If we wish to tread far away from the old minimalist fact epistemology presented by other classical apologists, then we need to consider what does the Christian worldview have to say about such. That is grounded in God’s word. Hebrews 6:13 says “For when God made the promise to Abraham, since He could swear by no one greater, He swore by Himself,”. This shows that God and his word have the highest authority. 

“4) The transcendental methodology of the Presuppositionalist is to start from a basis of things that we know and use (e.g. logic), and transcendentally deduce what must be the necessary preconditions for it to be the case. So when entering into this intellectual exercise, we don’t need to know what those preconditions are in order to appeal to logic. After all, we must use logic to transcendentally deduce anything!”

It starts not with things not necessarily known, but with beliefs, that people take for granted. The preconditions of intelligibility are not what people are always familiar with. We take any experience and ask “What must be the case in order for this experience to make sense?”.

“5) You said: If I need to refute an infinite amount of worldviews, then you do as well.” Actually, no. I don’t make the claim that my WV is the only one that can fit or account for the preconditions of thinking, so I don’t have to defend that assertion. First, I’m not sure that merely showing a consistent and internally coherent metaphysic logically entails its truth. This is due to the simple fact that validity is not soundness. That is, an argument, or meta-narrative, can be 100% internally consistent and “fit” things like basic logical principles, uniformity, and moral values in a transcendental sense, yet also be 100% made up. We’ve learned that some of the synthetic a priori “necessary truths” that Kant tried to deduce through his transcendental method turned out to be empirically false (e.g. that the universe is Euclidian).”

i) Where did I state that a logically coherent metaphysic entails truth? I haven’t endorsed any coherence theory of truth. Read Dr. John Frame and Dr. Vern Poythress on that issue.I have dealt with that in response to another individual

ii) The issue with Kant is that he only argued by positing a conceptual scheme. Kant’s notions reduced to his own subjectivity. I am making an even deeper claim that ties with how the world must actually be and not what it must appear as. Kant isolated himself from talks about metaphysics at the expense of rationality.

iii) You have posited an infinite set of possible worldviews, but I think this poses a dilemma for classical, not Reformed, apologetics. If infinite worldviews are available, what is to say another non-Christian worldview could not account for all the same evidence and arguments Classicalism uses, but against Christianity? How can you reconcile an infinite set of possible interpretations of evidence, and therefore underdetermination, with your classical arguments for Christian Theism? It would seem Classicalism (and evidentialism) no less than “presuppositionalism” assumes the impossibility of the contrary, but only the latter consistently maintains as much.