TB: How did you become a Christian?
Vela: Only by the sovereign grace of God and his providence in knowing me, dying in my place, calling me, and bringing me home. As the saying goes, I added nothing to my salvation except the sin that made it possible. However I’m sure you are looking for the testimonial aspect of it. In that regard, I was born in a non-Christian home with no religious upbringing at all. I grew up entirely unchurched and was an atheist for my teen years. It was actually in college during an undergraduate philosophy program that one of my professors, an atheist, was going through arguments for the existence of God in a metaphysics course. He was forthright enough to admit that some of them posed strong challenges to non-religious and naturalistic worldviews. Of particular interest to me was a version of the moral argument in which the responses from my own naturalistic worldview seem inadequate to the task of grounding any meaningful theory of moral values and duties. From that time on, a slow dismantling of my naturalistic worldview was underway and I became more open to theistic explanations for philosophical concepts such as morality, logic, intentionality, rights, personhood, mind, etc. Shortly after I began dating a girl who took me to church several times and I absolutely….hated it. I now have the categories in place that looking back I realize it was a rather waspy, evangelical, seeker focused, kind of subcultural expression of the church. It was not until I began going to a different college aged service that appeared to not apologize for the hard questions and was no so steeped in “Christianese” that I heard the gospel afresh for the first time under the preaching of Dan Kimball. I went home one night after what was probably my 3rd service, and woke up in the middle of the night undone. That is the best way I can describe it. I felt, unraveled, provoked, unclean. Sinful. For the first time I realized what all those preachers had meant about my need for God and his grace of the cross. I prayed for the first time in my life, with the words of someone unchurched without any of the right terms or concepts to do so, but it was a moment of repentance and submission to the God who is there. I have grown in my worldview, my theological and philosophical beliefs and convictions, and my devotion to my Savior over time, but it was at the moment when God brought me to new life.
TB: Can you tell us a bit about your ministry?
Vela: The Freed Thinker Podcast and blog was born out of my ongoing discussions with my friends after my conversion. I was a philosophy major and so what did I do when I converted? I debated and dialogued and discussed and read and worked out ideas and concepts and formed arguments and abandoned arguments and so forth. My faith from the very beginning, because of my background, has been one submerged in the task of apologetics. Many of my friends could not fathom anyone becoming religious after being trained in enlightenment philosophy and thought. I was instantly the outcast, the weird one moving from liberalism to conservativism, from freedom to bondage, from free thinking to institutionalism. Growing up in one of the deepest blue areas of one of the deepest blue states and one of the most liberal state schools in one of the departments dedicated to the philosophical defense of the fortress of secular reason, it was anathema to go to religion. I was viewed as abandoning science and reason and embracing backwards morality and the patriarchy. So the discussions were fast and furious and frequent. I started contributing to discussion forums to practice how to respond to objections and “think out loud” with people who weren’t sitting right in front of me expecting an immediate answer. This was before Facebook and Twitter rules of decorum and shorter comments were expected, and so often my discussions would involve walls of text. After a time, people watching and friends reading asked me to start saving my comments to send to them, or turn into articles and so the blog was born (though originally under the name Logical Theism). A few years later, after podcasting became a thing, demand for audio versions of my articles or of my Sunday school classes were being requested. I started scripting out podcasts and trying to put out as much content as my busy life could handle. Though the podcast and blog have become more of a public record of my personal intellectual interests- which vacillate from apologetics against atheism and naturalism, philosophy, Jesus mythicists, Biblical, exegetical, systematic and historical theology and studies, and even church history- the purpose has always been to build up the intellectual life of the Christians who listen, and to challenge the notion of a irrational or anti-intellectualist church held by those unbelievers who may listen in – to help those who have been freed in Christ to think freely, and to help free thinkers be freed indeed.
TB- You are a presuppositional apologist. Can you summarize the presuppositional approach and what led you to adopt that methodology?
Vela: Presuppositionalism is an angry tiger. It has several different ways people conceptualize and discuss it from different views (Van Tillian, Clarkian, and whatever you call Frame and Bruggencate), and people are passionate about their one view. You could ask 15 different Presuppositionalists to explain it, and because it is so vast, they will emphasize different focuses of it, different aspects, and different applications. And in fact, there are different methodologies associated with it so you may have a Van Tillian Presuppositionalist who is in favor of theistic proof while another will ridicule them in practice. I readily admit this is a downside of the subculture of Presuppositionalists.
However, what I think we all have in common is this – God is God. It sounds weird and almost trivially true but it is vital. God is God, the Creator and sustainer of all things. Nothing would exist if God did not exist. Like the moral argument above (which is a kind of transcendental argument), there is an argument for logic that could be phrased the following way:
1. If God did not exist, then the laws of logic and rationality would not exist.
2. But the laws of logic and rationality do exist.
3. Therefore, God exists.
The argument is valid and the defense of #1 involves tactics like the impossibility of the contrary and a challenge for the unbeliever to ground logic and rationality by their own worldview. I’m not going to defend the argument here, but imagine what it would mean for the atheist to try and overcome the argument by using the very logic that they cannot ground on their own worldview. They quite literally need to presuppose the truth of the Christian worldview, in order to help themselves to the logic and rationality that is only possible on that worldview, in order to say that the Christian worldview based on the existence of the God of the Bible is false. They quite literally need to sit on God’s lap in order to slap God in the face. It is utterly irrational.
Now most Christians could (and should be) convinced of this. However they do not identify as Presuppositionalists. Why is that? Well, Presuppositionalism says that the Bible shows all men are made in the image of God, and that because of the fall, sin has affected their entire constitution – their emotions, bodies, wills, and minds. As Romans 1 tells us, they know the truth but suppress it in unrighteousness. And so the Presuppostionalist believes, unlike the Evidentialist or the Classical apologist, that the unbeliever knows that God exists in virtue of being made in the image of God, and yet is actively (though unwittingly) suppressing that truth. It is not that they cannot reason (they can because they are made Imago Dei), but rather when they reason, they are doing it in a sinful, broken, and unwarranted way that blasphemes God. They are, by their very attempt to use their literally God-given reason, committing an act of blasphemy every time they try to be rational. Therefore, when they are trying to dispute the existence of God or dishonor his word, the Presuppositionalist simply says that we will not take part, in their attempt to blaspheme God and exert their autonomy while trying to put God in the dock (as C.S. Lewis wrote). They are trying to make themselves the standard and the judge and jury of God, rather than simply admitting that they are the creature and God is the creator. So the Presuppositionalist is not opposed to classical arguments for God’s existence. In fact, I appreciate many of them. The issue is that in order for them to work, logic already must be presupposed; for logic to presupposed, God must be presupposed; and not only by the Christian but by the cultist, the heretic, the unbeliever, and the atheist. There is no other way. So we simply say, that before we will discuss the objections of the atheists, we must first get on the table that the only way we can have a reasonable discussion, is if, and only if, the Christian God revealed in Jesus Christ and displayed in the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, necessarily exists.
TB: In the book Five Views on Apologetics, philosopher and theologian William Lane Craig argues:
”Presuppositionalism commits the informal fallacy of begging the question, for it advocates presupposing the truth of Christian theism in order to prove Christian theism. It is difficult to imagine how anyone could with a straight face think to show theism to be true by reasoning, ‘God exists, therefore God exists.’ A Christian theist himself will deny that question-begging arguments prove anything.” (William Lane Craig, Five Views on Apologetics, 233)
How would you respond to Craig’s criticisms?
Vela: I admire Craig and have enormous appreciation for his work in advancing the cause of Christ. I am not as ambivalent to his work as many Presuppositionalists are, despite my often pointed disagreements with his theological and philosophical commitments. However, Craig’s objection is a common one but makes one major flaw. In order for his objection to work, logic must exist to be employed so that he can attempt to rationally present his criticism. For that to happen, God must exist. And thus, for him to make the critique of the Presuppositionalist position, he must first help himself to the conclusions of Presuppositionalism. If you review the argument I listed above (a rather crass version of the Transcendental Argument), you can see quite clearly that it is not formally question begging – no premise of the argument contains the conclusion. If it were, then Craig would need to abandon his moral argument as well since it is quite literally the exact same conceptual and logical structure. However, the soundness of the argument does have one major entailment – that in order for the argument to be sound, we must already presuppose the conclusion to be true in practice in order to even have the tools at our disposal to state, defend, or object to the argument. If it is true, it is necessarily true that we could not even reason about reasoning, we could not be logical about logic, if we did not already presuppose that God exists. And conversely, if we want to deny that presupposition, then we also, necessarily, abandon the very tools of logic and rationality that would be needed to make the very demand that we must not, nor cannot, beg the question and be logical or rational.
So while Craig’s objection appears to some to be a valid objection, it is reflexively destructive for it needs the very truth of the thing it denies to be true in order for the objection to be valid. That is, for the objection to be true, it must be false. Logic, and therefore God, win out yet again.
TB: What works would you recommend to those readers who want to learn more about the presuppositional approach?
Vela: There are several places that I would send people depending on their learning styles. Frames contribution to the Five Views of Apologetics put out by Zondervan is helpful but brief and many Presuppositionalists will take exceptions to some of the things said. Another book by Greg Bahnsen entitled Presuppositional Apologetics: Stated and Defended is another more academic work giving a basic outline of the theology and methodology that nearly all Presuppositionalists can agree on. One could look at the various books on Apologetics put out by K. Scott Oliphint such as Covenantal Apologetics. For audio, there is a four part lecture series by Bahnsen called “Van Tillian Apologetics 1-4” available via Westminster Seminary on iTunes. And if one would like to see Presuppositionalism in action during a debate, the Greg Bahnsen vs. Gordon Stein debate is the exemplar and gives a good impression of how a Presuppositionalist deals differently with the objections of atheism than someone like Craig would in his debates.
To learn more about Tyler Vela and his outstanding work, go here.
You can also see more of Tyler's work in his book Measuring McAfee or by viewing his recent debate with Aron Ra here.
I would like to publicly thank Tyler Vela for participating in this interview.
Courage and Godspeed,
Chad
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