“What is the basis of truth?”
When George Barna asked Americans this question in 2020, 15% said they didn’t know. Another 15% believed the answer lay in science, while others appealed to “inner certainty” (16%), tradition (5%), social consensus (4%), or God (42%). The remaining 5% claimed truth does not exist, although how they know this claim is true remains unclear.
By asking this question, Barna was probing Americans’
The divided responses to Barna’s survey question highlight our culture’s need for epistemic clarity. In response, this two-part article series introduces how a Biblical worldview (rather than human reasoning) yields the best basis for justified beliefs—the most intelligible epistemological framework.
Two types of knowledge include:Knowledge by acquaintance—having direct familiarity with a person, thing, or mental state.
Propositional knowledge—knowing about someone or something by means of a true proposition, or statement.
Anderson and Welty argue that the existence of logic requires the existence of God. To build this case, they first state that the laws of logic are necessary truths because “we cannot imagine a possible world” in which a law such as noncontradiction is false. In reply, one atheistic philosopher objects that perhaps we can imagine a possible world where at least one contradiction exists in an abstract (rather than concrete) realm. But can we in fact imagine this scenario coherently?
The presence of a single contradiction in one possible world would contradict a strict law of noncontradiction. This outcome would render the strict law of noncontradiction false with reference to a certain possible world only by presupposing some version of the law’s truth (at least in its ability to judge itself) with reference to the same world. The argument against the necessity of noncontradiction thus serves to underscore the importance of noncontradiction as a generally applicable concept in every possible world.
Van Til elaborates by asking, “Anyhow why should one ‘rational being’ who had become rational by Chance, seek to lord it over another ‘rational being’ who also had become rational by Chance? In a world of Chance there can be no manner of self-identification and there can be no system of truth.”
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A similar dilemma arises from considering that, for worldviews based on man’s word, humans inductively piece together beliefs based on information derived from sense perception. Using information from our senses to try discerning whether we can trust the information from our senses represents arbitrarily circular reasoning.
The trouble is that any argument based on naturalism must borrow concepts such as logic, knowledge, and morality to be intelligible. These arguments apply the laws of logic to contend that we can have warranted knowledge of the tenets of naturalism and that we ought to believe these arguments. But naturalism provides no philosophical foundation for the warranted use of these concepts. Theism, however, does."
Van Til elaborates by asking, “Anyhow why should one ‘rational being’ who had become rational by Chance, seek to lord it over another ‘rational being’ who also had become rational by Chance? In a world of Chance there can be no manner of self-identification and there can be no system of truth.”
.webp)
The trouble is that any argument based on naturalism must borrow concepts such as logic, knowledge, and morality to be intelligible. These arguments apply the laws of logic to contend that we can have warranted knowledge of the tenets of naturalism and that we ought to believe these arguments. But naturalism provides no philosophical foundation for the warranted use of these concepts. Theism, however, does."
AIG
