Category: Philosophy

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The Problem with Progressive Thinking

The problem with evolution is that its essence is progress. Progress must be assumed. By progress I do not mean mere improvement, but progress that rejects all which preceded it as faulty and broken. By assuming that the human race is continually evolving, it must see the previous race as failed, and needing improvement. Progress becomes the worldview, and an expectation. Evolution is total-izing, in that no aspect of reality is allowed to be explained apart from it. Thus religion, family, economics, government, the humanities, etc., can only be explained in evolutionary terms, as insufficient as was and being in need of revolutionary makeovers. But this evolutionary process can never end, for in progressive thought, the state to which we have progressed must be seen as failure in the future. This, of course, applies to all reality except evolution itself. As it serves as its own ground and foundation, it cannot change.

It isn’t the evolutionary thinking about the past that should trouble Christians. It is evolution’s  future interpretation of the past and present that should.

Scott Jacobsen

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Ultimate Presuppositions

van til

“But herein precisely lies the fundamental point of difference between Romanism (Roman Catholicism) and Protestantism. According to the principle of Protestantism, man’s consciousness of self and of objects presuppose for their intelligibility the self-consciousness of God. In asserting this we are not thinking of psychological and temporal priority. We are thinking only of the question as to what is the final reference point in interpretation. The Protestant principle finds this in the self-contained ontological trinity. By his counsel the triune God controls whatsoever comes to pass. If then the human consciousness must, in the nature of the case, always be the proximate starting-point, it remains true that God is always the most basic and therefore the ultimate or final reference point in human interpretation.
This is, in the last analysis, the question as to what are one’s ultimate presuppositions. When man became a sinner he made of himself instead of God the ultimate or final reference point. And it is precisely this presupposition, as it controls without exception all forms of non-Christian philosophy, that must be brought into question. If this presupposition is left unquestioned in any field all the facts and arguments presented to the unbeliever will be made over by him according to his pattern. The sinner has cemented colored glasses to his eyes which he cannot remove. And all is yellow to the jaundiced eye. There can be no intelligible reasoning unless those who reason together understand what they mean by their words.”
Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith (The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company: Philadelphia, 1955).