Five Ways to Make the Case

Every Christian apologist can quote Acts 17:2-3. Paul reasoned from the Scriptures, explained and proved that the Christ had to suffer and rise, and announced that this Jesus is the Christ. The verse shows that the apostles argued. It does not, by itself, settle how. Paul's hearers in Thessalonica already accepted the Hebrew Scriptures, so he could start there. What should you start from when your hearer does not accept the Scriptures at all? What counts as evidence for someone who does not believe in God? Is there any ground the believer and the unbeliever share, and if so how much? These are questions of method, and Christians have answered them in different ways for very good reasons.

In 2000 the American philosopher Steven Cowan edited a book called Five Views on Apologetics, in which five Christian scholars each set out a method and then responded to the other four. William Lane Craig argued for the classical method, Gary Habermas for the evidential, Paul Feinberg for the cumulative case, John Frame for the presuppositional, and Kelly James Clark for Reformed epistemology. The book is useful because it lets each approach be stated by someone who holds it, and then lets each one answer its critics. This lesson follows the same pattern. Each method is set out first in the form its defenders would accept; then section 5 lets each meet its strongest criticism and reply.

Before starting, two warnings. First, these are not five teams. Most apologists use more than one approach, and some of the scholars named below would refuse a single label. The categories are tools for thinking, not tribes to join. Second, the disagreement is not about whether the gospel is true or whether God must open the heart. All five agree on both. The disagreement is about where to begin, what the unbeliever can be expected to accept, and what an argument can achieve. Those are serious questions, and getting them wrong can make an apologist either arrogant or useless, but they are questions among people who share the faith.

The classical method argues in two steps. First it argues that God exists, using what has traditionally been called natural theology: reasons drawn from the existence of the world, its order, the moral law, and the nature of the human mind. Then, once it has established that there is a God, it argues from historical evidence that this God has acted in Jesus Christ, above all by raising him from the dead. Its ancestry runs back to Thomas Aquinas, whose Five Ways in the Summa Theologiae argue for God from motion, causation, contingency, degrees of perfection and purpose, and whose Summa contra Gentiles first sets out what reason can know of God and only then turns to truths known by revelation. Modern defenders include Norman Geisler, whose Christian Apologetics appeared in 1976, R. C. Sproul, John Gerstner and Arthur Lindsley, who together wrote Classical Apologetics in 1984, and William Lane Craig.

The case for the order is this. A miracle is an act of God, so whether a report of a miracle is believable depends on whether there is a God who could act. To someone who is sure that the universe is a closed system of natural causes, no evidence for the resurrection will ever be enough, because he will always prefer any natural explanation, however unlikely, to one that he believes is impossible. The Scottish philosopher David Hume argued in 1748, in the tenth section of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, that it is always more reasonable to believe that a witness is mistaken or lying than that a law of nature has been broken. The classical apologist answers that Hume's argument works only if one has already ruled out God. So the first step must deal with God, and only then can the evidence for the resurrection be weighed fairly. Classical apologists point to Romans 1:19-20, where God's eternal power and divine nature are understood from His workmanship, and to the order of Paul's speech at Athens, which begins with the Creator and ends with the resurrection (Acts 17:24-31). They add that the order is a matter of logic, not a script; in a conversation you may start anywhere, but the case as a whole stands on the first step.

The evidential method agrees that evidence matters but denies that it must come in two fixed steps. On this view, historical evidence for the resurrection can itself be evidence that God exists. If the best explanation of the facts is that Jesus of Nazareth was raised from the dead, then that fact tells you not only that he was vindicated but that there is a God who raised him. The argument can go in one step, from the history to God and Christ together. John Warwick Montgomery, a Lutheran lawyer and theologian, argued this way in History and Christianity (1971), and Gary Habermas has spent much of his career developing what he calls the minimal facts approach, which builds the case only on facts about Jesus' death and the disciples' experiences that a large majority of critical scholars, including sceptical ones, accept. Module 3 of this track examines that approach in detail. The tradition is older than the name: Joseph Butler's Analogy of Religion (1736) and William Paley's A View of the Evidences of Christianity (1794) both argued from probability and testimony.

The evidentialist's strongest point is that this is where the apostles began. Peter at Pentecost appeals to what his hearers had seen: 'Jesus of Nazareth was a man certified by God to you by miracles, wonders, and signs, which God did among you through Him, as you yourselves know' (Acts 2:22), and then, 'God has raised this Jesus to life, to which we are all witnesses' (2:32). Luke says the risen Jesus 'presented Himself to them with many convincing proofs that He was alive' (Acts 1:3). Paul lists witnesses, most of them still living, and stakes the whole faith on the event: 'And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is worthless, and so is your faith' (1 Corinthians 15:14). Christianity, the evidentialist says, is a historical claim and can be tested like one. Many hearers, especially those with little patience for philosophy, can weigh testimony and evidence far more readily than an argument about contingent beings, and the apologist should meet them there.

Presuppositional apologetics was developed by Cornelius Van Til, a Dutch-born Reformed theologian who taught at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia from its founding in 1929 until the 1970s, and set out his view in The Defense of the Faith (1955). It was popularised by his student Greg Bahnsen, whose lectures were gathered after his death into Always Ready (1996), and refined by John Frame. Its starting claim is that nobody reasons from neutral ground. Every person has ultimate commitments, presuppositions, that govern what he counts as evidence and what he counts as reasonable. Scripture says that 'The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge' (Proverbs 1:7) and that in Christ 'are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge' (Colossians 2:3). If that is true, then to argue as though God's existence were an open hypothesis, to be tested by standards the unbeliever sets, is already to concede the main point in dispute: that human reason can judge God without God.

The presuppositionalist therefore argues differently. Romans 1 says that unbelievers already know God and suppress that knowledge (1:18-21). The apologist's task is not to supply missing information but to expose the suppression. He does this with what is called a transcendental argument, an argument about the preconditions of experience. Logic, science and morality all rely on things the unbeliever uses every day: that the laws of logic hold everywhere and always, that nature is uniform so that the future will resemble the past, that some things are really right and wrong. The presuppositionalist argues that only the God of scripture, personal, rational, unchanging and good, makes sense of those things, and that the unbeliever's own view, followed through honestly, cannot account for them. Van Til called this proving Christianity from the impossibility of the contrary. 'In Your light we see light' (Psalm 36:9). In 1985 Bahnsen debated the atheist Gordon Stein at the University of California, Irvine, and pressed this question rather than the traditional proofs, asking Stein to account for the laws of logic on his own premises. Bahnsen also used the pair of proverbs in Proverbs 26:4-5: do not answer a fool by adopting his premises, and do answer him by showing where his premises lead.

Two misunderstandings need clearing away, because defenders of this method rightly resent them. It is not fideism, the view that faith needs no reasons. Van Til insisted that Christianity is the most reasonable position there is, and that the unbeliever is the one being irrational. And it does not refuse evidence. Frame in particular uses historical and scientific evidence freely, insisting only that it be presented as what it is, evidence within a world God made, rather than as data that a neutral judge may accept or reject on his own authority. The charge of circularity is met head on: every ultimate authority, the presuppositionalist argues, must be argued for by appeal to itself, because if it could be proved by something higher it would not be ultimate. The rationalist uses reason to prove reason, the empiricist appeals to experience to justify experience. Frame distinguished a narrow circle, which simply repeats its conclusion, from a broad one, which brings in all the evidence and shows that it fits only one framework, and argued that the Christian circle is the broad kind.

Reformed epistemology comes from a group of philosophers, chiefly Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff and William Alston, who began from a different question: not how to persuade unbelievers, but whether a believer who has no argument is being irrational. Plantinga's early book God and Other Minds (1967) argued that belief in God is in the same position as belief in other minds. Nobody has a knock-down argument that other people have minds, yet nobody thinks it irrational to believe they do. In the essay Reason and Belief in God, published in 1983 in the volume Faith and Rationality that he edited with Wolterstorff, Plantinga attacked what he called classical foundationalism, the view that a belief is rational only if it is self-evident, evident to the senses, or supported by arguments from beliefs of those kinds. He pointed out that the view fails its own test, since it is not itself self-evident, evident to the senses or provable from such beliefs, and that it would make most of what we rightly believe irrational: memories, other minds, the reality of the past.

In place of that view Plantinga argued that belief in God can be properly basic: rational and even knowledge without being based on argument, in the way that a belief formed by memory or perception is. In Warranted Christian Belief (2000) he set out what he called the Aquinas and Calvin model. Calvin had written in the third chapter of the first book of his Institutes of a sense of the divine, sensus divinitatis, placed in every human being, and in the seventh chapter of the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit by which believers are persuaded of scripture. Plantinga argued that if Christianity is true, it is quite likely that God has given human beings a faculty like that, and that beliefs it produces, when it is working properly, would be warranted. The view's texts are Romans 1:19, 'what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them', Romans 8:16, 'The Spirit Himself testifies with our spirit that we are God's children', and Jesus' praise of the Father for revealing these things 'to little children' (Matthew 11:25). Its apologetic task is mainly defensive: answering the objections, such as the problem of evil, that might defeat a believer's properly basic belief. That does not mean it despises arguments. Plantinga himself wrote a set of lecture notes in 1986 called Two Dozen (or So) Theistic Arguments. It means only that the believer's right to believe does not wait on them.

The fifth method looks less like a proof and more like a verdict. Its modern statement owes much to the Oxford philosopher Basil Mitchell, whose The Justification of Religious Belief appeared in 1973, and it was the view Paul Feinberg defended in Five Views on Apologetics. The cumulative case apologist says that Christianity is not best defended by a chain of deductive arguments in which every link must hold, nor by a single line of historical evidence, but in the way a judge weighs a case, a historian reconstructs an event, or a doctor reaches a diagnosis. No single piece of evidence is decisive. Together they point one way. The question is which account of the world, Christian theism, atheism, pantheism or another, best explains everything we have to explain: that there is a universe at all, that it is ordered and intelligible, that there are conscious minds, that there is a moral law, that people across the world report experiences of God, that Jesus of Nazareth lived and taught and died as he did, that his followers proclaimed his resurrection and that the church survived.

John Henry Newman, in his Grammar of Assent (1870), had made a related point: most of our firmest convictions are reached not by formal proof but by the convergence of many probabilities, too numerous and too subtle to be set out as syllogisms, which a trained judgment recognises together. He called the faculty that does this the illative sense. The American philosopher C. S. Peirce had compared good reasoning to a cable whose fibres may be ever so slender, provided they are numerous and intimately connected, rather than to a chain that is no stronger than its weakest link. Richard Swinburne, in The Existence of God (1979), gave the cumulative approach a more formal shape, using probability theory to argue that the various arguments together make God's existence more probable than not. C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity, first given as radio talks on the BBC during the Second World War, works in something like this way, moving from the moral law to the claims of Christ without claiming that any one step is a proof.

The cumulative case apologist has texts too. John says, 'Jesus performed many other signs in the presence of His disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may believe' (John 20:30-31): many signs, of which a selection is offered. Luke speaks of 'many convincing proofs' (Acts 1:3) and introduces his Gospel by saying that many have written accounts and that he has carefully investigated everything (Luke 1:1-3). And the speeches of Acts together, rather than any one of them, use creation, providence, conscience, Scripture, eyewitness testimony and the changed lives of believers. The strength of the method is that it describes how most people really do change their minds about large matters. Nobody becomes a Christian, or leaves the faith, because of one syllogism. They do it because a whole picture of the world comes to seem true or false.

Each method has a strongest objection, and each has a reply its defenders find adequate. Here they are in turn, each method answering last for itself.

Against the classical method, evidentialists say the first step is unnecessary and can lose the hearer in philosophy before he ever hears about Jesus; presuppositionalists say that arguing up to God from neutral premises concedes that reason can sit in judgment on its Maker; and critics of every kind point out that the traditional arguments, even if sound, reach a first cause or a designer, not the Father of Jesus Christ. Classical apologists reply that the first step is not a demand that every conversation begin with Aquinas, but a claim about what the case logically rests on; that reason is God's own gift and that common ground is real because unbelievers live in God's world whether they admit it or not; and that the arguments were never meant to reach the Trinity on their own, which is exactly why there is a second step.

Against the evidential method, classical and presuppositional apologists both say that facts do not interpret themselves. A convinced naturalist will treat any natural explanation, however strained, as more probable than a resurrection, so the history cannot do its work until the worldview question is addressed. Evidentialists reply that this is to treat the naturalist's prejudice as if it were an argument. The minimal facts, they say, are accepted by sceptical historians on ordinary historical grounds; the burden then falls on the sceptic to give a better explanation of them, and when every natural explanation has been tried and found wanting, the refusal to consider a supernatural one is shown to be what it is. An event like the resurrection, if it happened, is itself evidence about what kind of world this is.

Against the presuppositional method, the most common charge, made by Craig among others in his response in Five Views, is that it begs the question, arguing in a circle that cannot persuade anyone who does not already believe. A second charge is that a transcendental argument would have to show not only that some God is needed to make sense of logic and morality, but that only the triune God of scripture will do, which means examining each rival view, including Islam and other theisms, one by one; and that in practice presuppositionalists too often assert the conclusion rather than argue it. Presuppositionalists reply that every view argues in a circle at the level of its ultimate authority, and that the Christian circle is broad enough to take in all the evidence; that the transcendental argument is a real argument, carried out by examining rival views from the inside, which is exactly what a careful presuppositionalist does; and that the abuse of a method by its weaker practitioners is not a refutation of it.

Against Reformed epistemology, the famous objection is one that Plantinga named himself, the Great Pumpkin objection, after the comic strip in which a child waits every year for the Great Pumpkin to rise from the pumpkin patch: if belief in God can be properly basic, why not belief in anything at all? A second, deeper objection is that the model shows only that Christian belief is warranted if it is true, and so gives no reason to think it true; and a third, that it helps the believer more than it helps the questioner. Plantinga replied that a belief is properly basic only in the right circumstances and when formed by a faculty working as it should, so that saying some beliefs can be basic does not mean that any belief can; he conceded the second point openly, saying that whether Christian belief is true is a question his argument does not try to settle; and Reformed epistemologists add that answering the objections that would defeat belief is real apologetics, and that a method which explains why the believing grandmother who never read a book is not irrational has done something the others have not.

Against the cumulative case, the British philosopher Antony Flew, in his critique of natural theology, objected that if each argument is a leaky bucket, putting ten leaky buckets together does not make one that holds water. Others object that the method is too loose: there is no agreed way to weigh one piece of evidence against another, so its conclusions depend on the judgment of the person weighing. Cumulative case apologists reply that Flew's image assumes each argument fails entirely, when in fact each is evidence that raises the probability of the conclusion, and that buckets with holes in different places can be nested so that the water stays in. And they answer the second objection by pointing out that every serious judgment people make, in a court, in history, in medicine, in marriage, is made in exactly this way, and nobody concludes that such judgments are therefore irrational.

Some things are settled. All five methods hold that the gospel is true and that its truth is not a private feeling; that the apostles reasoned with people and expected reasons to matter; that the Holy Spirit, not the apologist, brings a person to faith; and that arguments, however good, are not the gospel. On the rest, honest Christians stand in different places. Several of the scholars in Five Views acknowledged by the end of the book how much they shared, and in practice most apologists borrow from more than one method. What matters for you is to know which assumptions you are making when you choose a method, and to choose for the person in front of you, not for the method you enjoy.

Consider how that works. A village elder who has always believed in a High God who made the world does not need an argument that God exists; he may need to hear why the Creator has come near in Christ, and a cumulative account of who Jesus is will serve better than the cosmological argument. A Muslim friend already believes in God, revelation and the resurrection of the dead, but not that Jesus died on the cross; for him the historical evidence for the crucifixion is the live question. A university student who has been told that science has disproved God may need the classical arguments, or may need the presuppositionalist's question about what makes science possible at all. A believer whose faith is shaking under one objection may need Reformed epistemology's reminder that her trust in God was not irrational before she met the objection, and then a careful answer to the objection itself. Paul spoke differently at Thessalonica, Lystra, Athens and Caesarea. The method serves the hearer, and the hearer is never a category.

Open your defence notebook to the list of questions you began in the last lesson and choose the one you marked as most common. Turn to a fresh page and write it at the top.

Under it, write five short paragraphs, one for each method, each beginning with the method's name. In each, write the first two or three sentences an apologist of that school would say in reply to the question, in plain words, as if to the person who asked it. You will find some easy and some very hard. That is the point. If one method gives you nothing to say, write down why: is it that the method does not suit this question, or that you do not yet know enough to use it?

Then go back to the paragraph you wrote in the inquiry about how you came to believe. Read your five paragraphs against it, and against what you know of the person who asked. Underline the approach, or the combination of approaches, that you think would best serve that person, and write one sentence saying why. Do not decide which method is right in general; you will keep learning that through the whole track. Decide only what would help this person first. When you reach the capstone in module 5, this page will be the start of your answer to that question.