The more I study the advocates of presuppositional apologetics the more I find a habitual inability on their part to get things right when it comes to philosophy. The most recent errors I have discovered are Bahnsen’s treatment of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and his treatment of the cosmological argument. For now I want to focus on his treatment of Wittgenstein. On page 3 of Bahnsen’s book, Van Tils Apologetic, he says, “If the apologist treats the starting point of knowledge as something other than reverence to God, then unconditional submission to the unsurpassed greatness of God’s wisdom at the end of his argumentation does not really make sense.” First, contrary to Bahnsen’s assertion, this statement doesn’t make much sense since reverence for God and epistemology are different matters altogether. Second, the most interesting thing of this statement, in my view, is the footnote attached to it pointing to a famous passage from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. The footnote says this, “Ludwig Wittgenstein confessed that a devastating incongruity lay at the heart of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. If he was correct in his eventual conclusions, then the premises used to reach that conclusion were actually meaningless: ‘Anyone who understands me eventually recognizes [my propositions] as nonsensical, when he has used them –as steps- to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)’ In similar fashion, evangelicals sometimes utilize an autonomous apologetical method. Instead of assuming the authority of Christ, they use that method like a ladder to climb up to acceptance of Christ’s claim, only then to “throw the ladder away,” since Christ is now seen as having an ultimate authority that conflicts with that method.” I have studied Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. It is incredible that Bahnsen would take this passage and somehow associate it with apologetic methodology. In order to properly understand this passage, you have to understand what Wittgenstein was trying to accomplish with his philosophical endeavors. Let’s take a brief look at Wittgenstein’s thought. The rest can be found at this link: thesocraticcatholic.blogspot/2015/01/greg-bahnsen-misunderstands-wittgenstein.html
Posted on: Tue, 20 Jan 2015 22:01:34 +0000
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