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"God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos; He will set them above their betters." -- H. L. Mencken
From A Storehouse of Knowledge
| “ | To look for a point of contact with the unbeliever in the unbeliever's notions of himself and his world is to encourage him in his wicked rebellion and to establish him in his sell- frustration. We have already seen that the natural man is under the self-imposed delusion that he is "free," i.e., independent of the control and counsel of God, and that the "facts" about him are also "free" in this way. He may pretend to be "open- minded" and ready to consider whether God exists. But in being so "neutral" he commits the same sin as Adam and Eve.
Why seek truth where only a lie is to be found? Can the non- Christian tell us and therefore the Christ himself what the facts are and how they are related to each other, in what way they cohere, while yet excluding creation and providence? If he can, and if he can tell us truly, then the Christian story simply is not true! Because the natural man cannot do this, because the Christian message is true, I have sought and still seek to reap the benefit of a theology in which the triune God of Scripture has the initiative in salvation. The Calvinist's idea of an actual as opposed to an imagined point of contact is not just some useless notion. It is the only intelligible point of contact possible. The non-Christian holds that pure chance and absolute fate are equally ultimate and mutually correlative limiting concepts or heuristic principles which man uses to explain the fact that we have learned much about the world, that there is order in the world, a uniformity, while there is also continual change and development. But the non-Christian's "explanation" is no explanation at all. To say "it just happens" as an explanation of an event is really to say, "There is no explanation that I know of." The Calvinist, therefore, using his point of contact, observes to the non-Christian that if the world were not what Scripture says it is, if the natural man's knowledge were not actually rooted in the creation and providence of God, then there could be no knowledge whatsoever. The Christian claims that non-Christians have made and now make many discoveries about the true state of affairs of the universe simply because the universe is what Christ says it is. The unbelieving scientist borrows or steals the Christian principles of creation and providence every time he says that an "explanation" is possible, for he knows he cannot account for "explanation" on his own. As the image-bearer of God, operating in a universe controlled by God, the unbeliever contributes indirectly and adventitiously to the development of human knowledge and culture. | ” |
| —Cornelius Van Til, father of presuppositional apologetics[1] | ||
| “ | Indeed I do not decry evidence. In fact the presuppositionalist is more of an evidentialist than the evidentialist. We say that all evidence is evidence of God, even one's very ability to reason about evidence. | ” |
| —Sye TenBruggencate, presuppositionalist | ||
| “ | In order, meaningfully, to say that you have evidence for your god, you must be able to conceive of something that would be evidence against your god. Ultimately, of course, "presuppositional apologetics" is a fancy name for lying. | ” |
| —A shrewd commenter on Sye TenBruggencate's rubbish | ||
| “ | The authority of the Bible, as our rule of faith, is demonstrated by its own separate and independent evidences, literary history, moral, internal, prophetical. It is found by the geologist in possession of the field, and he must assume the aggressive, and positively dislodge it from its position. The defender of the Bible need only stand on the defensive. That is, the geologist must not content himself with saying that his hypothesis, which is opposed to Bible teachings, is plausible, that it cannot be scientifically refuted, that it may adequately satisfy the requirements of all the physical phenomena to be accounted for. All this is naught, as a successful assault on us. We are not bound to retreat until he has constructed an absolutely exclusive demonstration of his hypothesis; until he has shown, by strict scientific proofs, not only that his hypothesis may be the true one, but that it alone can be the only true one; that it is impossible any other can exclude it. | ” |
| —Robert Lewis Dabney, 1982, on why Calvinists should treat their apologetics as a purely defensive matter and intentionally neglect to offer much by way of support for their affirmative claims. This strategy is much of what passes for science among creationists. | ||
| “ | Anorexics, victims of an eating disorder, cannot always be helped because the very condition leads to denial of what's wrong with them; creationism we might say is a thinking disorder which also generates denial about its own irrationality. In their own eyes, creationists are sane and impartial, the competent scientists, the faithful interpreters of scripture, the true Christians. To everyone else their science is worthless and their religion deviant; and they can't see it, so they're crazy. They have a religious disability. You can do the equivalent of holding a mirror up to the anorexic, which is to quote the immense body of scientific and theological expertise proving their errors; but to the creationist, this simply proves that you are part of a Satanic conspiracy to undermine the true faith. | ” |
| —Rev. Richard Bradshaw [2] | ||
