More on Apologetics...

The myth of the neutral scholarJohn Frame explains, "To tell an unbeliever that we can reason with him on a neutral basis, however that claim might help to attract his attention, is a lie. Indeed, it is a lie of the most serious kind, for it falsifies the very heart of the gospel—that Jesus Christ is Lord. For one thing, there is no neutrality. Our witness is either God’s wisdom or the world’s foolishness. There is nothing in between. For another thing, even if neutrality were possible, that route would be forbidden to us."Explaining Van Til's position one man writes, "The claim to neutrality in the school or elsewhere was, according to Van Til a dogmatic position.Behind the claim to neutrality lay something most unsavoury. “…whatever the details may be, the whole of so-called neutral education is based upon the Platonic-Kantian principle of the independence of human thought and as such is diametrcially opposed not only to Christianity but also to God.”Commenting on Nancy Pearcey's book Total Truth, another author explains, "At the foundation of Pearcey's argument is the presupposition that people inevitably live their lives by means of a worldview. "It is impossible to think without some set of presuppositions about the world," she writes. Consequently, Christians should live out their lives on the basis of a consistent Christian worldview that is not compromised by Enlightenment secularism or by any other worldview. Yet that is difficult, says Pearcey, because for centuries Christians have formed the habit of synthesizing the Christian view of life with Greco-Roman and modern secularist worldviews. Christians often live schizophrenic lives and don't even realize it. Under the modernist guise of neutrality, writes Pearcey, many scientific and naturalistic ideas are presented as "objective, rational, and binding on everyone, while biblical views are dismissed as biased private opinions." The effect of such a dualism—a kind of cultural schizophrenia—"is that Christians will abandon the world of ideas to the secularists. They will fail to see that secularism is itself a philosophical commitment—and that if they don't bring biblical principles to bear on various issues, then they will end up promoting nonbiblical principles."From Al Mohler's article, "All scholarship is based in some faith and deeply grounded in some set of presuppositions. For the vast majority of those engaged in academia today, that faith is some form of ideological secularism. Christian scholars should always be absolutely transparent and clear about their confessional commitments. As a matter of fact, this should be an absolute requirement of their confessional institutions. At the same time, we should never allow that those who hold alternative worldviews are any less ideologically or intellectually committed. The radical nature of ... proposal indicates just how committed he is to his own faith--and how blind he is to his own faith-based perspective. Watch this debate with interest--it is not going away any time soon."And one last quote from Mohler, "No argument is truly irreducibly secular. For anyone who wants to make an argument about anything beyond procedure will have to deal with questions of meaning, morality, and value--questions that are larger than any individual human frame of reference. On issues like those, there are no arguments that are genuinely secular. As a matter of fact, listen carefully to those who most seek to advocate purely secular arguments. On questions of meaning and morality, their arguments are themselves just as essentially religious as the "religious" arguments they reject. They may believe their claims are not religious, but they end up being religious precisely because they are anti-religious. Moreover, they attempt to set up their own version of God--their own idea of what is the ultimate good--in order to determine value...There is no neutrality. On questions as ultimate as the existence or non-existence of God, or the binding or non-binding character of His dictates and commands, or the objectivity or subjectivity of morality, or the absoluteness or non-absoluteness of truth, there are no mediating positions. There is no neutrality.