You can't make a monkey out of Van Til

Greetings.

I went back and reviewed some of Philip Johnson's works and the works of his colleagues in their battle against philosophical naturalism (www.apollos.ws, Access Research Network, The Wedge of Truth, etc). I was encouraged to see a pressupositional approach often included in their apologetic. They rightly stress that Darwinism is nothing but a Trojan horse for importing philosophical naturalism into the mainstream.

What is impressive is how consistently right-on Van Til was from the start in his apologetic against Darwinism. Because of his transcendental approach in apologetics, he was able to " destroy speculations and every lofty thing that would raise itself up against the knowledge of God" without getting bogged down in trendy or compromised methods of refutation. He didn't get rattled by "new discoveries" or "conclusive proofs" from Darwinists because he knew that though there might be new things for us to discover, there is nothing new for God; he knew that unbelievers claim brute fact, then strain it through an interpretive framework of unbelief. Here is a small sample:


The Test Of Relevancy

It is important to see the exact point at issue here. The Christian position is certainly not opposed to experimentation and observation. As Christians we may make various hypotheses in explanation of certain phenomena. But these various hypotheses will always be in accord with the presupposition of God as the ultimate explanation of all things. Our hypotheses will always be subordinate to the notion of God as the complete interpreter of all facts, and if we make our hypotheses about facts subordinate to this God, it follows that there are no brute facts to which we can appeal in corroboration of our hypotheses. We appeal to facts, but never to brute facts. We appeal to God-interpreted facts. This is simply another way of saying that we try to discover whether our hypothesis is really in accord with God’s interpretation of facts. The ultimate test for the relevancy of our hypotheses is therefore their correspondence with God’s interpretation of facts. True human interpretation is implication into God’s interpretation.
In contrast to this, the ordinary scientific method seeks to determine the relevancy of hypotheses by an appeal to brute facts. An ultimate chance is assumed as the matrix of facts. Then the chance collocation of facts is taken as the rational tendency among these brute facts. And the relevancy of an hypothesis is determined by its correspondence to this “rational tendency” in things. Thus the circle is complete. We start with brute fact and we end with brute fact. We presuppose chance as God, and therefore conclude that the God of Christianity cannot exist.

Christian-Theistic Evidences Chapter 4: Christianity and its Factual Defense, The Test of Relevancy