As I was flicking through Greg Bahnsen's book "Van Til's Apologetic" I came across these footnotes...P.110 &142
If the mind of God does not sovereignly determine the relationship of every event to every other event according to His wise plan, then the way things are in the world and what happens there are random and indeterminate.In this case, there is no intelligible basis for holding that my experience is like any other experience, there is nothing objectively common to the two of them, and there is nocausal connection between any two events and thus they are meaningless and indescribable.
If the laws of science, the laws of logic, and the laws of morality are not seen as expressions of the unchanging mind of God, then the notion of universal and absolute "laws" or the concept of order in the contingent,changing world of matter makes no sense whatsoever. In what way could anything truely be universal and law abiding when every event is isolated and random? If universality is supposed to be objective, then there is no justification for holding to it on the basis of man's limited experience, where if universality is subjective (internal to man's thinking), then it is arbitrarily imposed by man's mind on his experience without warrant.
Of course the reason we cannot help believing is no longer, if it ever was, due (as the unbeliever thought) to psychological and social conditions, but due tothe sovereignty of God, who gives order to everything by his rational controlling plan.
The Christian worldview rescues life and reasoning from chaos and meaningless
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2 comments:
wasn't it Kant that claimed that reason was capible of discovering moral unversals. The use of consistency of maxims can prove something to be morally good or bad; if we all didn't tell the truth then society couldn't function.
Lance
Yes lance, Kant did, but he does not have a foundation to say so. Reasoning uopon our reasons do not tell us if our choices are good or bad. I think many societys have worked without holding to moral truth, for it all depends on what a society decideds is right and if its working for them. As for "US" we believe ever one knows because of God's , universal moral law.
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