Daniel Akande's Blog, page 2

Atheism and the Metaphysics of Chance

The world we experience is characterized by individuality, novelty, and change. The world is contingent. It can even be said that the most persistent empirical experience we have is that the world is contingent and constantly changing; everything is on the move.

If we combine such a picture with an atheistic view, we see that the atheist is committed to a metaphysics of Chance. Chance reigns supreme. Absolutely anything can happen. The world is contingent, so there are a lot of things that are po...

Hymnals & Presuppositionalism

“On Christ the solid rock I stand,

All other ground is sinking sand,

All other ground is sinking sand”

This chorus from the popular hymnal “The Solid Rock” is so simple yet profound. It is profound because it not only echoes a Christian truth, but it also captures the basic idea of the presuppositional method of apologetics in a simple yet beautiful way.

Christ is the Solid Rock not only religiously or morally but intellectually as well. Christ alone is the solid foundation upon which one can erect ...

The System and the Facts

Every fact requires a context to be intelligible. Individual words, propositions, objects of experience, and facts about the world require a context in which they can be intelligible and interpreted. 

The proposition "the monkey ate the banana" would not be intelligible without a system of beliefs about monkeys, bananas, eating and a host of other things. Also, our experience of individual objects cannot be made sense of without reference to concepts and categories of interpretation. When we expe...

Unbelievers Can’t Answer This Simple Question

There are many ways to illustrate the futility of unbelieving philosophy but I think one of the coolest ways to do that is to pose a simple question. Unbelievers cannot provide a good answer to the simple question:

why do you believe gravity will apply 20 seconds from now?

In truth, this can be applied to any belief we have about the natural world. Any answer to such a question would in one way or another rely on past experience.

The argument is something like this:

I experienced the force of gravit...

A Christian Understanding of Modality

Possibility. Actuality. Contingency. Necessity.

These four categories are quite essential to our understanding of the world. We may not use these terms exactly, but we constantly refer to the concepts they describe in our speech. Words like “could”, “may”, “must”, “can’t”, etc. can be used to loosely refer to these categories. If we wanted to be philosophically precise, we’d call them modal categories. Modality is an aspect of metaphysics/linguistics dealing with the mode in which things exist, a...

Van Til Was A Genius For This

 Hey, 

Take a look at this passage from Van Til’s An Introduction to Systematic Theology:

“...in all non-Christian forms of epistemology there is first the idea that to be understood a fact must be understood exhaustively. It must be reducible to a part of a system of timeless logic. But man himself and the facts of his experience are subject to change. How is he ever to find within himself an a priori resting point? He himself is on the move. …Every effort of man to find one spot that he can exha...

Can Muslims and Jews Use TAG?

When I began getting a better grasp of Presuppositional Apologetics and transcendental arguments, I started running into a little problem. Whenever I would apply the transcendental argument against unbelief, often times I was met with some variation of this objection: “well I see no reason why a Muslim or a Jew or any of the other monotheistic religions couldn’t use the same argument you’re using to prove their own god”

The issue wasn’t that I thought the objection was forceful. My standard appro...

Does The Universe Have Any Meaning?

One of the deepest philosophical questions that has plagued human thought for ages is whether or not our existence has any meaning. There is the existential form of the question that is concerned with whether there’s a point or purpose to our existence. However, there is also the epistemological form of the question that is concerned with whether the universe is meaningful and can be known or understood. It can be argued that the two forms of the question cannot be divorced from each other, but ...

What a Mathematics Course Can Teach You About Transcendental Arguments

Some time ago, I was taking a Mathematics course and we were dealing with Set Theory - particularly the set of Real Numbers.

I won't bore you with the details, but we were talking about the axioms of addition, multiplication, binary operations, etc. And basically, all it was was the abstract foundation of the ordinary basic arithmetic that we do.

In the middle of the lecture, what crossed my mind was how abstract all of it was. When people do ordinary addition or multiplication, they do not have a...

What Is “The Impossibility of the Contrary”?

If one has studied Presuppositional Apologetics even a little, one would no doubt have come across the phrase “the impossibility of the contrary”. But what does it mean? Well, obviously it means that the contrary is impossible. But what is the contrary and in what sense is it impossible? And if it is impossible, what significance does that have to our apologetic approach?

Logically speaking, two propositions are said to be contraries if they cannot both be true. For example, the propositions ‘I a...