Greek Philosophy is Intellectual Apostacy

In corrcting the error that the world was prepared for the Christian religion by Greek philosophy Van Til is straight and to the point:

The philosophy of the Greeks is a philosophy thought out by apostate or would-be autonomous man. It is therefore a philosophy in which apostate man makes himself believe that he is not a creature of God but is rather a being who participates in the being of God. It is a philosophy in which man does not think of himself as a sinner before God but as participating in the being of God and as with God confronted by some principle of evil for which neither has any responsibility. It is a philosophy in which man, together with any god he thinks he knows, is surrounded by an ultimately non-rational environment. It is a philosophy in which any God that he knows must know in essentially the same way that man knows. It is a philosophy in which a God who redeems man redeems himself toward an ever higher ideal of God that he, with man as participant in him, casts up for himself. It is, in short, a philosophy in which the natural man seeks to suppress the truth about himself in his relation to God as the Creator-Redeemer. Such is the Greek Logos.

"Christianity in Conflict" p.60

Van Tll goes on to say that a proper use of common grace must have as its correlative the doctrine of total depravity:

If the idea of common grace is to be used in connection with the Christian’s appreciation of Greek culture as something to be made subservient to and even taken up into Christianity, then this must be done in conjunction with the biblical teaching of total depravity. Greek monotheism was the product of apostate man. It was a system of thought by which apostate man sought to suppress the revelational pressure of the true God upon him. Common grace increases and intensifies this revelational pressure. In receiving the benefits of common grace the “noblest” minds of Greece were challenged to forsake their policy of making gods in their own image so that they might serve the true and living God. But Stob makes common grace an instrument by means of which the Greek, the natural man is not called to repentance. The result is an idea by which the Greeks are regarded as being at least on the way to truth in terms of their apostate culture.

"Christianity in Conflict" p.64

Common grace is often misconstrued so as to blur the doctrine of human depravity or deflect the directness of God's wrath upon sinners. We blunt the message of the Gospel if we put common grace in the service of the autonomous man Christ was sent to save.