Not a Ban on Evidence

A page that calls itself For the New Christian Intellectual posted a question and then answered it.

Q: How can you reason with someone who claims the following kind of nonsense?

1. “The God spoken of in Scripture cannot be proved to exist by any other method than the indirect one of presupposition.” (Van Til, The Defense of the Faith, 1955.)

2. “The apostles were certainly not afraid of evidence; yet we notice that they never argued on the basis of it.” (Bahnsen, “The Impropriety of Evidentially Arguing for the Resurrection,” 1972).

A: You don’t.

No one accepts that kind of nonsense except by a juvenile method of dishonesty.

You cannot reason with someone who insists that claims should not be established on the basis of evidence.

All you can do is point to the obvious immorality of their method. It speaks for itself.

I am less of a Kuyperian than I used to be.[2] What follows is not a defense of the sphere-talk or the neo-Calvinist program, though both still have merit and should not be left on the periphery.

Van Til and Bahnsen are still basically right about the status of the God of Scripture. It is the mischaracterization of their positions that I want to address.

The Object

Distinguish three claims.

1. Some first principles are not proved the way a particular fact is proved.

2. The God of Scripture is not one more fact inside a field of already-intelligible facts.

3. Evidence is illegitimate, and claims ought not be established by it.

(1) is ordinary. Logic, induction, the reliability of the senses, and the existence of the world are not conclusions waiting at the end of a further brief. (2) is Van Til’s actual sentence. (3) is the sentence the post needs in order to stop reasoning. (3) does not follow from (1) or (2). It is a further thesis, and it is a thesis about a position Van Til and Bahnsen did not hold.

Van Til’s point, in the pages around that quotation, is that the issue between believer and unbeliever cannot be settled by a direct appeal to “facts” or “laws” whose nature and significance is already agreed upon by both parties. The question is what makes a fact a fact. The method is indirect: start from the opponent’s viewpoint for the sake of argument and show that, from that position, the facts don’t hold up; then have them consider the Christian perspective for argument’s sake and demonstrate that only there do facts and laws make sense.[3] That is a claim about the court, not a ban on exhibits.

Bahnsen’s sentence is of the same species. In the 1972 essay he says the apostles were not afraid of evidence. They preached the resurrection as fact. They explained its meaning, its fulfillment of prophecy, its place in redemption. What they did not do, on his reading, was treat those facts as data that an autonomous reasoner could weigh from a shared, religiously neutral starting point and then decide whether God had spoken.[4] The resurrection is God's act that interprets history. It is not first a probability that has to survive the skeptic’s criteria and then, if it passes, become theology.

Grant the worry the post is aiming at — fideism; circular speech that never touches the world; a Christianity that treats Hebrews 11 as a license to stop thinking. Grant also that Van Til can be read carelessly, and that some of his heirs have talked as if evidence were a concession. None of that turns (2) into (3).

The apostles used evidence. Paul at Athens points to what has been made and even quotes the poets they already know. In Corinth he lists witnesses. They never treated those facts as independent of the God who raised Jesus and now commands all men everywhere to repent.[5] Real evidence, not feigned neutrality—that’s the balance the quotations aim to preserve. Two standalone sentences don’t erase it.

The Rule

Now, consider the last two sentences of the post; they are not an evidential conclusion. They are a stipulation.

Call the rule V:

(V) If a man will not establish claims on the basis of evidence, you do not reason with him. You point to the immorality of the method and stop.

For V to license the walk-away, the post still has to establish that Van Til and Bahnsen are such men. Two quotations, cut free of the pages that define “indirect” and “on the basis of it,” do not establish that. On the post’s own standard, the conversation-stopper is the thing being condemned.

Apply V to V

The claim that “indirect proof” equals “no evidence” was not shown. The claim that a disagreement over starting points among confessing Christians is already a moral disqualification was not shown. Those are the very things that would have to be established if the standard is “claims must be established on the basis of evidence.” A rule that exempts its own last two sentences from the standard it imposes is not a defense of evidence. It is a veto.

If the last two sentences are the method, V already has a verdict on them. They do not establish, on the basis of evidence, that Van Til and Bahnsen refused evidence. They announce that the conversation is over and that the other method is immoral. On V, a method that will not establish its load-bearing claim on evidence is immoral. That is his sentence, not a gloss. Applied to itself, V condemns the walk-away it recommends. The immorality he wants pointed at is then his own procedure: isolate two quotations, refuse the pages that define them, treat a dispute over starting points as a moral disqualification, and stop. If V is true, that procedure is the thing V said to point at. If V is not true, the last two sentences still fail, only now they fail as a stipulation rather than as a sin. Either way the walk-away is not available.

Worse: if V is allowed to stand, every rival worldview may use it. The consistent materialist can say he will not reason with anyone who “insists consciousness is not a brain state.” The Muslim can say he will not reason with anyone who will not start from the Qur’an. The fideist, whatever is meant by that name, can say he will not reason with anyone who treats the fear of the Lord as the beginning of knowledge. The man who is certain the neighbor is a Habsburg spy can say he will not reason with anyone who has evidence to the contrary. Once “you started in the wrong place” is enough to end the argument and begin the moral lecture, reason is no longer the court. Starting points are.

That is not how reason behaves when first principles collide. The costly thing is the opposite of what the post recommends. You do grant the other side’s starting point for the sake of argument—not because you agree with it, but because that is how you test whether their house can stand. Van Til said that is how you deal with the unbeliever. Using the refusal-to-grant move against a brother who differs on method is not consistency. It is the same move, aimed at the wrong target, and then declared too obvious to argue.

The public square and the court of argument

This site has already refused the myth that the public square is neutral.[6] The same refusal belongs in the court of argument. There is no view from nowhere from which “evidence” arrives already interpreted and “reason” sits as an umpire above the God who made minds. Romans 1 does not say the things that have been made are dark. It says they are clear, and that men suppress what they know. Suppression is a moral act. It is not cured by first granting the suppressor a neutral bench.

You can think Van Til overstated the case. You can think Bahnsen was too sharp toward the evidentialist school. You can prefer Aquinas’s way of climbing, or Warfield’s, and still owe the quotations the object they actually name. What you cannot do, if you care about reason, is applaud a post that treats a methodological dispute as a reason to stop reasoning.

The method does speak for itself. The method that will not grant the other starting point even for the sake of argument has already decided that its own starting point is not a claim. That decision is not established by evidence. It is announced. Announcement is not the same thing as proof. The last two sentences needed a narrower claim, or they have already broken the standard they invoked.

Notes

1. For the New Christian Intellectual (Cody Libolt), Facebook post circulating 16–17 September 2026. The Van Til sentence is from Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1955). The Bahnsen sentence is from Greg L. Bahnsen, “The Impropriety of Evidentially Arguing for the Resurrection,” Synapse II (Westminster Theological Seminary, January 1972); reprinted by Covenant Media Foundation (PA003).
2. “Less of a Kuyperian” here is not a dismissal of Kuyper. It names two refusals and a limit. I refuse anything that collapses the two kingdoms into one, or any other rejection of the older dualisms. I refuse the universalism, egalitarianism, and utopianism that flatten particular loves of people, place, and nation. Most of Stephen Wolfe’s observations on that last point I have taken as valid. The limit is this: I take the sphere-talk as helpful in illustrating God’s sovereignty and Christ’s reign while maintaining those older Reformed distinctions. In short, I accept the good work that Kuyper has done and while leaving the shoddy furniture at the dump.
3. Van Til, Defense of the Faith, 122–23, 130. “The method of reasoning by presupposition may be said to be indirect rather than direct.” The nearby claim is that this God—the God who has spoken in Scripture—cannot be proved by a method that first treats human experience as already lit and then asks whether the sun exists.
4. Bahnsen, “Impropriety.” He adds that they “unashamedly appealed to it as fact” and that evidence has a confirmatory place inside presupposed faith. The target is the attempt to move a man from his own circle into the Christian circle by treating the resurrection as a brute particular on shared autonomous ground. See also Bahnsen, “Evidential Apologetics: The Right Way,” Penpoint 6, no. 11 (November 1995): presuppositional apologetics “endorses and indeed encourages the use of evidences—but not evidences offered in the ‘traditional’ manner as an appeal to the authority of the unbeliever’s (allegedly) autonomous reasoning.”
5. Acts 17:22–31; 1 Corinthians 15:3–8.
6. Essay V of Christ, the Nations, and the Public Square, “The Myth of Neutrality.” The square is never morally vacant. Neither is the court in which we argue about God.