Derrida, Foucault and Van Til

A brief blog entry, but I'd like to take a moment to recommend an excellent lecture series by Christopher Watkin, a professor at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia as well as a Van Tillian presuppositionalist. In this series he interacts with two of the most influential French postmodernist philosophers of the twentieth century, Jacques Derrida and Michael Foucault, and compares their philosophy with the revelational epistemology of Cornelius Van Til. Well worth your time.

https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/course/derrida-foucault-bible/#course-introduction

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Arthur C. Clarke, Logical Positivism and the Myth of Moral Naturalism

" The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion. " - Arthur C. Clarke One of the most acclaimed and influential science fiction authors of the twentieth century, Arthur C. Clarke's magnum opus was the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey , which was translated into a groundbreaking film by Stanley Kubrick. As also was his contemporary titan of speculative fiction Isaac Asimov, Clarke was a devoted humanist who championed a vision of an atheistic utopia, free from the pollutant of religious belief. Clarke self-identified as a "logical positivist" - a philosophical position that asserts that only statements that are verifiable through empirical observation can contain any meaning. Other than the rather curious, self-refuting consequence of logical positivism (that the theory itself cannot be given any meaning by its own parameters) eventually relegating it to the dustbin of discarded philosophical ideas, aspects of

Evidences in a Presuppositional Worldview

One of the most prevalent misunderstandings of Cornelius Van Til's apologetic methodology has been with his concept of evidences, and their application to apologetics. It has been charged that Van Til's presuppositional approach has no use for evidences whatsoever, and that the methodology is actually fideistic in nature. However, that assertion is simply untrue. Far from being a fideistic retreat, Van Til's apologetic methodology is in fact fine with using evidences, but only so much as they are used correctly. One could go even further and say that it's only in the presuppositional schema can such a concept of "evidence" even have any meaning. At the core of Van Til's approach to evidences is the fact that no fact exists in a vacuum, or as Van Til would call it, a "brute" fact (a fact that does not have an explanation or a meaning) does not exist. Each and every fact must be interpreted according to the worldview of the interpreter. A Chris

News on the POI Blog (or, It's Alive!)

The reason that there hasn't been any entries on the blog in almost a year (since July of last year, in fact), was due to the fact that yours truly has had a lack of a laptop with which to write it. As much as a blessing that smart phones have been for the last ten years, sadly when it comes to writing things such as blog entries they are, at best, cumbersome. However, I was recently blessed to have been able to get a brand new laptop. Now with this, expect blog entries at a much more rapid clip. I appreciate everyone reading this and look forward to writing frequent updates to the Preconditions of Intelligibility blog. Thank you so much for your support! Blessings in Christ, Ray

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