I am sure of two things regarding skepticism. The first is that it is a philosophically valid objection to philosophical theories of knowledge. The other is that the view is wholly unbiblical. I’m not very familiar with presuppositional apologetics, and until I ran across this summary essay of the views of presuppositional apologists such as Bahsen and Van Til, I was completely oblivious. I think it doesn’t really cross our minds to found even these arguments in scripture. Most of this comes from the philosophical assumption of objectivity: that we can discover things on our own, without God. It has deeply permeated our culture.

Apologists who utilize the transcendental argument for God, such as Cornelius Van Til and Greg Bahnsen in the past, and also Alvin Plantinga and Doug Wilson in the past and continuing into the present, argue that traditional arguments for the existence of God fail because they presume this subtle philosophical assumption. They fail because the theist grants to the non-theist the possibility that one might be entitled to logical formulations without presupposing the existence of God. And that these arguments are fundamentally flawed is true. But we need not be worried. There is a solution to this problem: Argue that atheists do not have the benefit of logic. This view has a wide variety of philosophical import because if it is true then theists alone can be logical and rational, exposing the non-theist as a connoisseur of absurdity, people who can only have, but do not want to have, their foundation in what Kierkegaard calls, for Christians, “the strength of the absurd.”

This argument in particular falls into the larger category of presuppositional apologetics, which argues that the presupposition of God’s existence is necessary for all issues, which by the universal nature of such a claim includes all issues rooted in philosophy or theology.

What does this view have in store for epistemology? I’m sure that philosophers with the repute of Bahnsen, Van Til and Plantinga have probably touched on this (especially Plantinga because his studies focus largely on epistemology and logic), but what happens if we question the skeptical argument on biblical grounds?

What does the Bible say? It says that God created heavens and the earth. The epistemological effect that this has is justification for believing that there is an external world (questioned by external world skeptics) and that we can have knowledge because we are created in the image of God. God has all knowledge, therefore we might at least have knowledge of some things, particularly those things that we find in scripture. If one wants to solve the skeptical problem, it seems to me that this is the only solution.

There are two interesting things to note here. The first is that neither of these necessitates that one should necessarily believe in the existence of God. The only effect that presuppositional arguments have is that it makes it very distasteful for somebody to deny the existence of God. Theists in the modern general population have been aware of this in the field of ethics for a long time. With God goes ethical certainty and any normative system of ethics. It is surprising to me, then, that they have failed to realize this about logic and epistemology.

But I have digressed here: we are concerned with the distasteful effects of denying God. This ethical consequence fails to be convincing because not many in the general population see this as an entirely bad thing. But losing logic and knowledge totally screws an atheist. No longer can they claim any right to argue or believe. Their beliefs are relegated to the absurd; their arguments are relegated to the absurd. But obviously this doesn’t necessitate believing in the existence of God; as I have said it merely makes it extremely unpleasant to not do so and makes philosophy irrelevant in general.

The other interesting thing is that this puts theist in a very special position with atheists who still want to presume they can be ethical, knowledgable, and rational. For these individuals who persist in believing such things, theists are on unique grounds now because faith is on higher ground than the atheist god Reason. Thus, there can be no argument pushing faith to the side as inferior to rationality. Rationality must be founded in faith, and faith cannot be dismissed as lower than reason but must be seen to govern reason.

Thus, it is of importance for Christians to show that arguments of the presuppositional variety are developed and put in front of atheists. If the existence of God will be the sole solution of these problems, then for any person who dislikes these it serves as a good means of showing the necessity of God. Of course, those who are not elect will continue to suppress their knowledge of the existence of God because they cannot come to God, but we should continue to pursue these avenues of dialogue in philosophical issues.