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I have been on a journey into the world of presuppositional apologetics. This field of philosophy/theology is about examining our basic foundational assumptions about life. Everyone has them whether they have ever thought about them or not. I have participated in discourse with atheists who claim that their belief system has been proven, and thus they made no assumptions or steps of faith in solidifying their worldview. No one can honestly make this claim. Not even the Christian. Somewhere the buck stops. Somewhere truth has to be self evidencing. Meaning if I am trying to prove a matter I have to prove the matter before that and before that and on into infinity. Somewhere truth, in order to be truth, has to stop at something that just issomething that gains its truthfulness not from another presupposition, but from the thing itself. Therefore, the discipline of presuppositional apologetics is about looking at worldviews from the top down instead of from the bottom up.
We ask questions to get people thinking about how they think. We point out that the very reason we can reason is that God is. We start at the place of God's existence and illustrate how all else makes sense through that paradigm or worldview. In this way it is shown that other worldviews fail to make sense of the world, and how they all borrow from the Christian worldview to bring a semblance of validity to their belief system. This is usually unintentional, but happens just the same. If Christianity is the worldview that gives the most adequate foundation for life then it follows that any other worldview has some of its truth contained within or else it wouldn't be plausible enough for anyone to believe it.
Apologist, Joe Boot puts it this way, "We must be willing to get to the foundations of our experience. If we remain content to decorate the interior of the house of knowledge and pay no attention to the structure and foundation stones of that house, we will find that the dry rot of absurdity and the rising damp of unexamined assumptions are fatal to the structure."
Many people assume worldviews that are not livable. Postmodernist philosopher Jacques Derrida wrote an entire book about how language had no meaning as it could not point to anything beyond itself to gain its meaning. He used language to communicate how language cannot communicate. How absurd is that? The same philosopher says that any reader can interpret what is written according to their own worldview. He goes on to say that one
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