Academics Big Picture

Why Cornelius VanTil?

Cornelius Van Til did groundbreaking work in the 20th century to begin to loosen the stranglehold which "faith in reason" has had on western civilization since the 12th century revival of Greek humanist thought. His work excels in elevating scripture to the highest place of authority for all men in every area of life. And it equips a Christian young person to boldly and confidently navigate the academics and social beliefs he will encounter among unbelievers. What is more it will ground him in how to apply the authority of Christ not only in Bible study and private life but in other fields of study like law, psychology, economics and political theory.

The starting point of Van Til’s work is that the Bible teaches that the believer and unbeliever do not reason the same way. They use the same logical faculties but they start with different religious premises. For instance, the creationist and the evolutionist are both educated and capable and they look at the same data, but they reach widely different conclusions. Why the difference? Because they begin with different foundational assumptions. The evolutionist "says in his heart there is no God" (Psalm 14:1) while the creationist believes by faith that God created the heavens and the earth (Hebrews 11:3).

Here we can see that the believer and unbeliever deal differently with God's revelation of Himself. Scripture teaches that every man knows who God is, what He is like, that He created the world, and that man is ethically accountable to God (Ro 1:18-32). The unbeliever knows the truth but he will only affirm it selectively when it is to his benefit to do so.

In particular, the unbeliever will affirm truth if it doesn't contradict or threaten his sin. It is often to his benefit to affirm the truth as with physics and mathematics and so forth. But at the point where the truth threatens his sin the unbeliever will suppress the truth and become downright “unreasonable”. We have abundant evidence of this in our society today in the gender debate.

This difference in how the believer and unbeliever reason about creation doesn't just impact our views of man's origins. It impacts all areas of man's intellectual activity. In other words, the existence or non-existence of the God of the Bible is the foundational assumption for all of man's intellectual endeavors. That was Van Til's main message. And its ramifications across all areas of man's intellectual activity are deep and profound.

For these reasons, any trust placed in fallen man to be intellectually honest is misguided. Instead, we must attack unbelief at every turn, in every subject of the academy and not let the rebel against God assume the center and disciple students into unbelief. Christ is to have dominion in the academy, not sinful, unbelieving man. The Biblical view of man’s knowledge that Van Til set forth is Biblically sound and revolutionary for our educational institutions as well as for the prophetic stance of the Church toward the unbelieving world.

Problems With Current Education

The principle illustrated above using evolution has bearing on all other areas of academics as well. If knowledge disciplines like psychology, economics and political theory are not explicitly built on the foundation that “the God of the Bible is true” then their downstream conclusions will be riddled with falsehood and ultimately misleading because they are based on a false first premise. This is not to say that they will not articulate “local truths” about man which are interesting or even helpful. But it means for each that the system of thought is rebellious and that as a system it disciples men to hell and asserts the dominion of evil.

This foundational assumption that the God of the Bible is true (or not true) is often known as a "pre-supposition". To "presuppose" something means to assume that it is true or false before beginning your argument. Such an assumption, however, may not be formally stated as part of the argument. In other words, in intellectual matters men presuppose the existence or non-existence of the God of the Bible usually without explicitly mentioning it in their presentation or arguments. Yet it is always there framing the argument and silently dictating the conclusion of the rest of the argumentation.

What often happens in education is that our young people learn these types of false downstream conclusions based on secular approaches to academics and cannot untangle the unstated assumptions presented to them. The conclusions are presented as truth and young students are not able to refute them. Thus, they can gradually imbibe the false original premise to a greater or lesser degree and their Christian worldview begins to lose coherence. It becomes populated with ideas some of which point to a Creator but many of which point to a secular faith that the God of the Bible is not true.

Such education is not consistent Christian discipleship. This a hidden cause of young people leaving the Christian faith in confusion during or after their years at a secular or secularly minded university. I say secularly minded because humanist views have deeply infiltrated Christian colleges and schools as well. We use secular minded books on psychology for instance because we lack a distinctively Christian psychology.

The Christian school or university has not fared well in western civilization because we have ignored the initial assumptions of “God or not God” in our academics. This weakness in Christian scholarship opened the door many years ago to secular thought which has progressively gained dominion in our schools and thus in our society.

Consider for a moment the path of Christian educational institutions in the United States over the last 400 years. Try to think of one that is more than 100 years old and still faithful to the Scriptures. Their apostasy is not a mystery. Rather, we can trace the course of their apostasy to two things: 1) their doctrines of knowledge which ignore that the believer and unbeliever reason differently; and 2) the downgrade of the authority of scripture for academics. This process of apostasy has been going full steam ahead since the late 1600s.

Equipping Young People

Young people should study theology as their foundation for all of life including academics. They should study the doctrines of God and man and understand how those doctrines form the foundation of the reformed, Christian worldview. In particular, they should understand that God reveals Himself to all men (Ro. 1:18-20), but that unbelievers reject that revelation and spend the course of their lives seeking to intellectually justify their rebellion. They quietly assume that there is no God and proceed to build complex structures which obscure their fundamental rebellion and lead unwitting students astray.

With training, however, young people can learn to identify and challenge the faith-based presuppositions of unbelievers. And they can learn to think about the world based on the assumption that the Bible is true, which is the correct way to build and do academics from anthropology to zoology.

Restructuring Education

As Christians, our knowledge disciplines should be biblical at the foundational level. This is a matter of being faithful to Biblical truth in all of life.

Why would we begin a study of Psychology anywhere other than what God tells us about man in the Bible? We know that the Bible is true. Why would we not start there? Man is created in the image of God and has fallen in sin. Genesis 8:21 tells us that "every inclination of the human heart is evil from childhood". Fallen man is going to have a lot of guilt unless he repents and comes to Christ. That guilt might create some strange emotions and behavior. In fact, it does. Dealing with that guilt and those emotions is the goal of modern Psychology.

The secular discipline of Psychology begins with the assumption that there is no God. It goes on to speculate that man's guilt is a false emotion caused by a variety of environmental factors including but not limited to archaic ethics from ancient religions that were coping mechanisms for man to understand the world before the age of science. Modern Psychology’s goal is delivering man from the pain of sin and the idea of sin and give him peace, all while denying the God of the Bible. It is clearly a false prophet.

Christian reliance on such a knowledge discipline is a sad state of affairs. Sure, the study of man by Psychology has produced some insights that are valid in an isolated sense. But as a discipline, it disciples/teaches men away from God and away from repentance. It funnels them into a view of the world that is consistent with the unstated initial premise that “there is no God”. Christian submission to such a course of study is akin to the Israelites studying at the University of Canaan.

The goal of Christian academics is to bring glory and dominion to Christ the King. Christian submission to pagan academics brings Him neither. Instead of following false secular prophets, young people should be trained to recognize the rebellious presuppositions of secular thought in academics.

For many Christians, there is a waking up point where we realize that "God" or "Not God" are the only two options. In Reformed theology this dynamic is referred to as the "antithesis". And when the unbeliever proceeds on the basis of "Not God" he is making a faith based religious assumption.

"Normal Academics" in America the Burden of Proof

For many Christians raised in America, it almost seems "normal" to assume "Not God" in our academics. We assume the God of the Bible on Sunday. But in our growing up we were trained to start our academic and social thinking with "Not God" as the default. Christians have been submitting to unbelief in the academy for a long time and we shouldn’t be.

So, how does the believer respond to the unbeliever? First, I would distinguish between evangelistic apologetics and the deeper going field of academic apologetics. When we say apologetics, most people think of the former. Christians should not be tribal about evangelistic apologetics. We should use whatever tool best addresses the situation. It might be evidence or a logical proof or a more presuppositional argument.

But in academic apologetics, the Christian should recognize that the basis of every academic discipline should be Christian. Period. And he should call out and seek to establish dominion over any thinking which begins with the assumption "there is no God". Why? Because it's not true. We know it is not true and we should not submit to it. The unbeliever can’t support his false position anyway. It is riddled with inconsistencies because it is false. Also, most importantly we should seek to establish dominion in the academy because Christ is King and the academy belongs to Him.

And the Christian should win that debate. The Christian world view has integrity because it is true. The unbelieving worldview has inconsistencies which an educated Christian can call out. We should not submit to unbelieving ideas in the academy but engage the unbeliever with the inconsistencies in his own view of the world. Christians are equipped to assume the center and should assume the center because Christ is Lord.

The Christian has no more “burden of proof” in the academy than the non-Christian. They both operate based on faith about God, man and the nature of reality. The unbeliever cannot show empirical proof for any of his answers to life’s big questions. He cannot empirically or logically prove man’s origins or why we are here or what is right and wrong. Rather, he has faith that there is no God and he creates his own story about why we are here and how we should live.

Thus, the contest between believer and unbeliever is faith vs. faith. And because faith in God or faith that "there is no God" is always the first premise in man's intellectual activity the contest will be fought not just from the pulpit but in our universities and culture and all areas of life. Academics becomes of vehicle of both evangelization and dominion.

Proclaiming God's Truth

The Christian is commanded by God to proclaim the truth of His word in all our preaching and intellectual activity. Christ is Lord of all of it. The Christian, however, has a tremendous advantage in this contest – his faith, his initial premise, is true and therefore more powerful than the false imaginations of the unbeliever.

Do we throw out evidential arguments? Absolutely not. The world is full of evidence about God. It is right and good for the Christian to point to it. Should we reject logical proofs like Aquinas' 5 arguments. No. Rightly constructed they can be profitable. Many of them were constructed based on the premise that reason was the best approach to addressing unbelief. Aquinas' 5 proofs point man only to "a god" but not a particular God. So their value is limited. Yet God can use various means.

But ultimately, our strongest stance will be to stand on the truth of God’s word which is “like fire” and like a “hammer than breaks rock in pieces” (Jer 23:29). The unbeliever will acknowledge truth up to the point where his sin is threatened then he will be dishonest. If we play by his rules on his turf, we are suckers.

The unbeliever says, “Prove it to me empirically and I will believe it!”. And the Christian responds, “OK, look at the biology of the male and female. There are obviously two genders, male and female.”

But the unbeliever will not acknowledge this clear evidence that there are two genders. His initial premise that “there is no God” leaves him room in his own system to suppose that reality is subjective and that gender may appear one way biologically but really be another way. After all, Christians used to think the earth was the center of the universe and persecuted scientists who taught otherwise. And so the debate goes on with the unbeliever denying the truth set before him because it implies limits for his sin.

As Christians, we bear the torch and the hammer. We call out the unbeliever declaring that he knows that God made creation and the unbeliever is denying what he knows to be true. God’s word is living, active and powerful. It lights the room and breaks hardened hearts.

Anything less than declaring and insisting upon the truth of God’s word in the academy is intellectually inaccurate and constitutes "building on the sand". Such a position submits to unbelief and opens the door to the dominion of unbelief in the academy. It will not withstand the testing of fire and will not bear the fruit that God desires because it gives ground to rebellious man that does not belong to him. He is not the judge. He is a denier of the truth (Ro 1:18-32). God is the judge and the One who sets the terms. The yardstick with the most authority is not man’s fickle reason but the word of the living God and the reformed doctrines of God and man which it sets forth.

Our goal is thus to reason first and foremost from the truth of God's word in every area of life. This means learning to identify where unbelieving thought has assumed God away and attack at precisely those points. We believe that Christians should set forth God’s truth to unbelievers in all areas of life in a constant call to faith and obedience to Christ.