Kant and Van Til
The influence of Kant on Van Til is traceable as a matter of history. Van Til himself credits two Dutch contemporaries as kindred spirits who were working within the Neo-Kantian stream of thought, namely, Herman Dooyeweerd and Dirk Vollenhoven. However, showing this to the satisfaction of adherents to Van Tillianism is hardly worth the academic labor. The more fruitful path is to show how Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason sets up the assumptions from which Van Til operates.1
The main reason why the latter is the preferred method is because when the Kantian influence on Van Til is brought up, invariably the response will quickly turn to “no such” claims to be rooted in Kant by Van Til himself, or (what is slightly more respectable) passages in which Van Til took Kant to task on this or that. My reply to both reactions is straightforward.
First, one need not realize how much they have been influenced by a stream of thought (or a singular thinker) in order for it to be the case. Besides this, it is all the more likely to be unwittingly influenced when that seminal thinker has asserted a dominance over an entire culture so that the implications are rather ingrained than overtly stated.
Second, the objections to Kant by Van Til and his followers are restricted to the autonomy of the mind and will of the human subject.2 It is never over the rejection of external, objective natures that they push back. On the question of whether the essence of things can be known, a posteriori, from effects to the First Cause—on this they are at one with Kant. God must be presupposed. He cannot be known via His effects. He cannot be positively demonstrated from one mind to another, as that would imply a common field from which common notions were known by all parties involved.
Kant’s Critique and the Role of Presuppositions
Naturally one needs to be familiar with Kant’s philosophy at some level in order to get from source to influence. It is well known that the backdrop for Kant’s Critique was disillusionment over Hume’s skepticism and the desire to restore theoretical thought for the purposes of science and ethics. What emerges from dispensing the older forms of rationalism and empiricism was a hybrid in which all of the data with which the mind works does come through the senses, but that certain categories of the mind give them their whole structure. This gives the subjective act an important priority over the objective nature of things that were previously considered to be independent of our minds.
What Kant put in the place of the older outlook was a two-tiered framework, in which the metaphysical “way things are” was placed above the line. This he called the noumenal. Most people tend to focus on the objects of this “upper tier” as being God, logic, love, justice, freedom, the self, and what he called “the thing in itself” (ding an sich). The significance of this last object is usually what is missed. It is not simply that “things up there,” that is, spiritual or invisible things, are inaccessible to reason. It is the essence of anything and everything that is inaccessible. In other words, it is precisely “the way things are,” outside of our minds in some common field, which was the old pipe dream of metaphysics.
Now below the line Kant placed the appearance of things to each of us. This he called the phenomenal. Again, those who miss the first point will miss the significance here as well. Superficial treatments of Kant take this lower tier to be the visible world studied by science. Indeed it is. However, that is precisely a post-metaphysical surface of those phenomena. If one is consistent, each set of data must be reduced to how it appears to me or to you.
Thomas Joseph White explains the consequences well,
“In what may be interpreted as a continuation of the Cartesian turn from the things in themselves to the knowing subject, Kant transforms the systematic knowledge of being into a study of the interior ‘grid’ through which reason interprets empirical experience, without a necessary reference to the structure of reality itself.”3
In other words, this moved the Western mind “beyond realism” and metaphysics: beyond the notion of objective truth. The consequence of this to our idea of theology is captured by Sebastian Rehnman:
“Theologians inhabiting the earth before Kant and non-Kantians ever since claim that humans can have immediate access to reality, whether it is that of nature or that of divine revelation. Kantians claim that there is no such immediate access but that we can only have human thoughts about reality ... [that] if there is a God and if this God does reveal himself, then that revelation is inaccessible to humans since their epistemic activities are only about intuitions and concepts.”4
Kant’s transcendental deduction set up a post-metaphysical framework in which things could be proved, if at all, only by presupposing some a priori conditions of the system. Naturally a conditional proof is a valid form in logic. That is not the problem. It belongs to that larger category of argument forms called “indirect,” in which we also find the reductio ad absurdum. It was not some special insight of the Van Tillians to reframe arguments for God’s existence along indirect lines. It is standard to anyone who has ever studied college level logic. What was unique to Van Til, and to Kant behind him, was to restrict all valid forms to these, as the a posteriori ground to metaphysics was now cancelled.
The section in the Critique on “antinomies” supposedly does away with whatever debris of natural theology not already cleared away by Hume. God cannot be known by reason—not objectively, not in the demonstrative way. The metaphysical conception of natural theology implies that there is a common field of objects serving as analogies for God. The reasons that brought Kant to move beyond this are more overtly philosophical, whereas for fideists working within the theological community, the reasons must wear a more pious garb. By either pathway, reason was divorced from nature, and thus both were divorced from God. Therefore, if there is an objective God to speak of at all, He must be presupposed for the purpose of science and ethics and, yes, even religion.
Hence the nineteenth century theologians replaced objective orthodoxy with this or that form of subjectivity. For Schleiermacher it was feeling, for Ristchl it was doing—but all that was left for the religious man was what was in the religious man.
The Kantian Bridge into Van Tillianism
For the conservative who wanted to reclaim orthodoxy without getting behind Kant—whether they knew it or not—something from the subjective would have to reassert divine authority. There were other influences which Van Til pays tribute to on occasion, whether the Princetonians, Hodge and Warfield, or else the Dutch thinkers, Kuyper and Bavinck. He preferred the latter, and precisely because the Princetonians too readily accepted the “common” starting points of known facts, which was inferred to proceed from a “neutral” territory and thus exalt “autonomous” reason.5 From Kuyper, he would learn the language of “antithesis” and from Bavinck the conviction to “take one’s stand in Scripture.” In the end, even they did not go far enough in ridding Reformed apologetics of that natural theology proceeding from below.6
Van Til put his method in this way: “To argue by presupposition is to indicate what are the epistemological and metaphysical principles that underlie and control one’s method. The Reformed apologist will frankly admit that his own methodology presupposes the truth of Christian theism.”7
Or elsewhere,
“It begins frankly ‘from above.’ It would ‘presuppose’ God. But in presupposing God it cannot place itself at any point on a neutral basis with the non-Christian. Before seeking to prove that Christianity is in accord with reason and in accord with fact, it would ask what is meant by ‘reason’ and what is meant by ‘fact.’ It would argue that unless reason and fact are themselves interpreted in terms of God they are unintelligible. If God is not presupposed, reason is a pure abstraction that has no contact with fact, and fact is a pure abstraction that has no contact with reason. Reason and fact cannot be brought into fruitful union with one another except upon the presupposition of the existence of God and his control over the universe.”8
Since the whole Enlightenment project, from Descartes to Kant, inverted the priority of metaphysics to epistemology, what stood in the later Kantian stream would come to reduce questions previously handled by metaphysical reflection to what amounted to what one thought about those objects so handled. One of the most persistent ways that this plays out among presuppositionalists is a conflation of the order of being with the order of knowing.
Here is one example in Van Til that perfectly summarizes the main way this happens. He says, “We must rather reason that unless God exists as ultimate, as self-subsistent, we could not even know anything; we could not even reason that God must exist, nor could we even ask a question about God.”9
Now first we must see that the classicalist will wholly agree that we ought to discern that God’s existence is a necessary condition for human knowledge in exactly the way Van Til says. So what is the problem?
Van Til is actually saying more than that God must exist in order for our reason to operate here. He is saying that one must know that God exists in order for our reason to operate here.
In order to remove any needless stumbling blocks, please note my use of the word “here” above. I am well aware that Van Til and those following him vehemently denied that he was excluding knowledge per se in the unregenerate mind. The issue has to do with one’s ultimate presuppositions and then how much of what follows in one’s theoretical constructs can be accurately known apart from Christian presuppositions. Now to extend fairness the other way, Van Til has to assume some of the blame for this confusion as his writings are filled with moments (to put it mildly) of ambiguity and hyperbole.
At any rate, returning to how this conflates the order of being with the order of knowing, let us review our example statement from Van Til:
“We must rather reason that unless God exists as ultimate, as self-subsistent, we could not even know anything; we could not even reason that God must exist, nor could we even ask a question about God.”
The statement may seem only to be an insight about metaphysics: God’s existence is the precondition. Yet we see from the previous statement—and both of these statements are representative of Van Til’s overall work—that unless or until any individual sees that metaphysical insight, that he cannot accurately fix predicates to subjects having to do with ultimate worldview considerations. So the previous statement was Van Til’s own description of his method: “It would ‘presuppose’ God … It would argue that unless reason and fact are themselves interpreted in terms of God they are unintelligible. If God is not presupposed, reason is a pure abstraction that has no contact with fact, and fact is a pure abstraction that has no contact with reason.”
Let us grant the above qualification about knowing “anything” at all. Here, anything is restricted to knowledge in the context of apologetics encounters. This is still a remarkable exclusion. Again, if the Van Tillian wants to walk that back, he is free to do so, but he must walk it back all the way and allow that a man can know a great many things about the world and man and causality and morality without consciously connecting that to the precondition for those things to be true. We all do it all the time. We knew our colors well before we knew that light was required. We knew who our president was before we knew the state of his birth. This is really a matter of common sense when one thinks it through. But the Van Tillian has dug in his heels at this spot and cannot bring himself to admit that this is the confusion he is engaging in.
This is not an isolated absurdity. It is central to the system. Van Til laments the classicalist in saying, “One who seeks to make intelligent predication about being in general allows in effect that one who does not make the Creator-creation distinction basic in his thought can yet make true assertions about reality.”10
What we have here is an “all-or-nothing” system in which one either start with God’s interpretation of all things, or else one cannot get started with any true things of ultimate import. Recall Kant’s distinction between the phenomena and the a priori categories. The former would be objective; but since all that was just naive realism, it is the interpretive grid of the subject that must be one’s starting point. It is the proper interpretation that makes truth more than merely “brute facts.” So Van Til says, “The human mind, it is now commonly recognized, as the knowing subject, makes its contribution to the knowledge it obtains.”11 That which is “commonly recognized” in the halls of philosophy is to be preferred, irony sold separately, over those old “common notions” among mankind as a whole. Only the latter is autonomous.
It is quite possible that Van Til interpreted Kant through the lens of Hegelian idealism. As a case in point, he asks:
“Has not Kant taught us that, if we are to have logical concatenation between the individual facts of our experience at all, we can have it just to the extent that we give up the impossible ideal of knowing individual things in themselves?”12
The Critique’s deconstruction of the “thing in itself” is all about the necessity of it being in an ideal (or a rationally interpreted) system, except with the further advance of Hegel, now a totalizing system in which each concepts is explainable only in terms of the whole.
In an unguarded moment of wanting to make his point Van Til says, “Without the presupposition of the truth of Christian theism no fact can be distinguished from any other fact. To say this is but to apply the method of idealist logicians in a way that these idealist logicians, because of their own anti-Christian-theistic assumptions, cannot apply it.”13
It is important to understand that while Van Til is distancing himself from idealists in one sense, showing that his Christian theism can do what their Idealist version cannot, yet in order to do so, he takes the very same position as these so-called “idealist logicians,” that is, making each fact square with every other fact: “Without such a system of truth there would be no distinguishable difference between one particular and another.”14
Sometimes the clues are in the language borrowed from his own formative years, in which idealism predominated. We have already run into the use of “transcendental” that is more than a merely nominal connection. Van Til also used the terms analytical and synthetic in a way similar to Kant. He used them in application to God’s knowledge and then outward to systems. God’s knowledge was said to be “analytical” or “self-contained” or “immediate” or “self-referential.”
It was said that Van Til borrowed the term “concrete universal” from Hegelianism. Some would say he did more than borrow here. This is to be distinguished from Kant’s “abstract universal,” which for Van Til implied a radical dualism in which the transcendent could not be known and thus could not give unity to the diversity of things in the world. While for Hegel, this was Geist (spirit) which drove the dialectical process onward, for Van Til it was the triune God who is both transcendent and immanent.15 In The Defense of the Faith, the term is used in its more traditional metaphysical setting. Here he puts it forth as the way to prevent each particular from spinning off into a universe of meaninglessness. But if all we do is abstract predicates into ever more general classes, then we have nothing left but abstract universals and abstract particulars: “It is only in the Christian doctrine of the triune God, as we are bound to believe, that we really have a concrete universal.”16
In this brief survey, the reader can see ways in which such influence has consequences for doctrine as well as apologetics. Both the origin and the later offshoot have in common a basic characteristic of fideism motivated to removed the objects of faith from the probing lens of modernity. It was far easier than applying the modes of thought already available from medieval Christendom, ones which, no doubt require more intellectual rigor to master, but which more thoroughly reduce any potential unbelieving system to nonsense.
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1. A more technical breakdown is offered by Thomas Schultz in “Presuppositionalism and Philosophy in the Academy,” in David Haines, ed., Without Excuse: Scripture, Reason, and Presuppositional Apologetics (Leesburg, VA: Davenant Press, 2020), 156-57. His division is between (1) direction connection, (2) indirect connection, and (3) parallel thinking connection. These move from simplest to most difficult to establish, since the first appeals to deliberate quotations of the seminal author by the influenced author; the second shows a chain of influence, such as “If a influenced b, and b influenced c, and c influenced d, then a influenced d”; whereas the last option is what I am calling “most fruitful.” Undoubtedly though it is the most difficult to show.
2. cf. Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 2008), 150, 156, 161; “Nature and Scripture,” in N. B. Stonehouse & Paul Woolley, ed., The Infallible Word: A Symposium by the Members of the Faculty of Westminster Theological Seminary (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 2002), 297-98.
3. Thomas Joseph White, Wisdom in the Face of Modernity: A Study in Thomistic Natural Theology (Washington D.C., The Catholic University of America Press, 2009), 14.
4. Sebastian Rehnman, “A Realist Conception of Revelation” in Trueman & Helm, ed., The Trustworthiness of God: Perspectives on the Nature of Scripture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 254-55.
5. Christian Apologetics (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 2003), 102-106; Defense of the Faith, 104-105.
6. A Christian Theory of Knowledge (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 1975), 20.
7. Christian Apologetics, 128; cf. Defense of the Faith, 121-22.
8. A Christian Theory of Knowledge, 18.
9. An Introduction to Systematic Theology (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 2007), 179.
10. Christian Apologetics, 38.
11. Christian Apologetics, 84.
12. Defense of the Faith, 137.
13. Defense of the Faith, 137.
14. Defense of the Faith, 137.
15. Common Grace and the Gospel (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 2015), footnote 38 on 13.
16. Defense of the Faith, 49.
