I Think & Speak, Therefore the Great 'I AM'

A Middle Way Between C.S. Lewis and Cornelius Van Til Through Donald Davidson

I am running behind on my companion essay for chapters 3-6 of C.S. Lewis’s Miracles! I’m sorry about this. It was due out today but I had two jiujitsu tournaments over the weekend and I was completely wiped out from them and didn’t have the chance to write as much as I had intended. I did win silver in the gi and gold in no gi, if that’s any consolation for you haha.

But I am sorry and hopefully this will be the only time I run late on the companion essays.

These chapters are the most difficult of the entire book so I want to give extra special care to my summary and analysis of them. I’m planning an bonus post solely on the history of the argument of chapter 3, both the progenitors of the argument before Lewis and those who’ve taken it further downstream of him.

So, the essay is coming later than planned. Hopefully, it’ll be done on Tuesday or Wednesday.

Some of you have expressed gratitude since this will give you more time to chew on the chapters but for those who rushed to get them read, I’m very sorry.

As an apology to my paid subscribers, who have joined largely for this read along, I want to share my Master’s paper on C.S. Lewis’s Miracles and Cornelius Van Til’s proposed transcendental method of arguing for the existence of God. I wrote the paper during a guided study under Dr. Kevin Vanhoozer during my systematic theology Master’s degree at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. I was really into philosophy and analytic theology at the time but I wasn’t quite a philosopher yet—that came during my philosophy MA at Palm Beach Atlantic. All that to say, it’s not as rigorous or tight an argument as it could be and I know this because I reworked it in my philosophy MA program, and presented it at two philosophy conferences. It’s currently under review at a journal or else I’d share that with you as well, but this version has the explicit CSL and Van Til references and flavor that you guys will enjoy.

So again, my apologies for the delay on the essay and for all the paid subs, please let this following paper mitigate some of your disappointment.

What does Philadelphia have to do with Oxford? That is, what does the apologetic methodology of Cornelius Van Til have to do with the apologetical work of C.S. Lewis? According to many, including Van Til himself, the two Christian thinkers could not have been more different in their approaches to defending the Christian faith. Thus the method of Van Til, the staunch Calvinist and avid presuppositional apologist, and the practice of Lewis, the mere Arminian Christian and eclectic apologist, upon first glance, appear to be irreconcilable. It is the project of this paper, however, to show that these two thinkers were closer in their arguments for the existence of God than their disparate theological commitments have let on. In the first part of this paper we will look at Lewis’s most mature work of apologetics, Miracles, through Van Tilian lenses in order to demonstrate the similarity in their projects. In the second part of this paper, we will move to synthesize and advance Van Til’s Transcendental Argument for the Existence of God and Lewis’s Argument from Reason by way of Donald Davidson’s Triangulation Argument. If this project is successful, then we will have been faithful to the desiderata of Van Til and Lewis’s arguments while advancing a transcendental argument for the existence of the Triune God from the possibility of human reason.

Impetus for the Study

Categorizing Lewis’s apologetic methodology is a tricky endeavor. Brian Morely argues that