day no. 17.123 presupp or shut up

Isaiah 54:17
“No weapon that is fashioned against you shall succeed, and you shall refute every tongue that rises against you in judgment. This is the heritage of the servants of the LORD and their vindication from me,” declares the LORD.

The legacy of the Lord's people is enduring the blows of pagan pugilism and refuting their heathen heresies with aplomb. We are not merely to seek to survive, but to endure and overcome. We outlast the worldlings like the anvil outlasts the hammer. We bear their blows and beat their hammers into smithereens. 

“We must not be satisfied to present Christianity as the most reliable position to hold among the competing options available. Rather, the Christian faith is the only reasonable outlook available to men.” — Greg Bahnsen, Presuppositional Apologetics: Stated and Defended

Christianity is not just a good option. It is the only option. We should not be content merely to be permitted to have a booth at the interfaith festival. We are not suggesting simply that Christianity is reasonable or reliable, we are insisting that Christianity is the only thing that makes reason possible, let alone reasonable.

“To reject revelational epistemology is to commit yourself to defending the truth of autonomous epistemology.” — Greg Bahnsen, Presuppositional Apologetics: Stated and Defended

Anyone who rejects the revelation of God must accept the speculations of men. If there is no eternal, unchanging, indomitable standard to which we can appeal, there is only a temporary, mutable, fragile standard to which you must attribute timelessness, consistency, and strength. If you do away with God, you are not only forced to defend godlessness, you are left defending it as though it were god.

“When we say that as Christians we believe in an ultimate rationalism we are, naturally, not intending anything like the idea that we as human beings have or may at some time expect to have a comprehensive rational understanding of God. We have just asserted the contrary. Here too every non-Christian epistemology may be distinguished from Christian epistemology in that it is only Christian epistemology that does not set before itself the ideal of comprehensive knowledge for man. The reason for this is that it holds that comprehensive knowledge is found only in God. It is true that there must be comprehensive knowledge somewhere if there is to be any true knowledge anywhere but this comprehensive knowledge need not and cannot be in us; it must be in God.” — Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith

A finite being cannot apprehend infinite knowledge. In order to know anything, everything must be housed somewhere else and someone must have access to that everything. God knows everything and by His grace He has given us access to general revelation through His creation and special revelation through His Spirit in addition to access to salvation through His Son.

“If one does not make human knowledge wholly dependent upon the original self-knowledge and consequent revelation of God to man, then man will have to seek knowledge within himself as the final reference point. Then he will have to seek an exhaustive understanding of reality. He will have to hold that if he cannot attain to such an exhaustive understanding of reality he has no true knowledge of anything at all. Either man must then know everything or he knows nothing. This is the dilemma that confronts every form of non-Christian epistemology.” — Cornelius Van Til

The buck has to stop somewhere in order to spend it. If it is not backed up by the treasury of Heaven, it must be backed up by the world's wallet But printing currency does not flood the world with more value, it only diminishes the value of anything previously printed. Only God can create ex nihilo because only God has life and light in Himself. He can make more things without reducing their value in the process. God is not less God after He makes something else and He has enough to make everything valuable in itself without borrowing value from something else. He is in a sphere of His own, but He sent His Son into our sphere to reveal Himself and He sent His Spirit after the Son ascended in order to spread that Good News.