Introduction to Apologetic Glossary of Terms

Basic Terms

A posteriori: Lat., after or dependent on experience. Propositions like “Some roses are red” or “Abraham Lincoln was the sixteenth president of the United States” are said to be known a posteriori.

A priori: Lat., prior to or independent of experience. Propositions such as “Bachelors are unmarried men,” or mathematical truths like 2 + 2 = 4, are usually said to be known a priori.

Deduction: An inference in which the conclusion follows necessarily from one or more premises. When the conclusion does so follow, the deduction is said to be valid.

Begging the Question: When one assumes as a premise for the argument the conclusion one intends to prove

Concept: A general idea, as distinct from a percept. I may have a concept of “man” or “humanity,” but I have a percept when I see a particular man, John Doe. We have precepts of particular, experienced objects; we have concepts of universals, classes, and unexperienced objects.

Epistemology: A branch of philosophy concerned with the source, scope, and limits of knowledge. Religious epistemology is a sub-branch of epistemology concerned with the knowledge and verification of religious claims.

Induction: Reasoning that attempts to reach a conclusion concerning all the members of a class after inspection of only some of them. Inductive knowledge is empirical. The conclusion of an inductive argument, unlike that of a deductive one, is not logically necessary.

Inference: A conclusion derived either from general premises (deduction) or from factual evidence (induction). Not to be confused with implication; one proposition is said to imply another hen their relation is such that if the first is true, then second must also be true.

Logical Positivism: A school of thought that would limit meaningful propositions either to those that are empirically verifiable or to those that are analyses of definitions and relations among terms. Empirically verifiable propositions are the concern of the sciences, and analysis of definitions and relations between terms is seen as the specific task of philosophy.

Metaphysics: A branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of reality or of what exists. The term ontology (the study of being) is often used synonymously.

Necessary: A term that refers to beings or states of affairs whose existence is necessary. A necessary being is one that must exist, that cannot not exist.

Postulates: A postulate is a fundamental assumption used as a basis for developing a system of proofs, but not subjects itself to proof within the system. Though some logicians use axioms and postulates as synonymous, for others an axiom is a self-evident truth, whereas a postulate is a presupposition or premise of a train of reasoning and not necessarily self-evident. In the latter sense, all axioms are postulates, but not all postulates are axioms. A postulate is a basic statement “taken for granted” from which other statements may be deduced.

Presupposition: A proposition that must be true for something else to be true.

Proposition: A statement that is either true or false

Scientific Method: The processes and steps by which the sciences obtain knowledge

Sense Datum: The image or sense impression. Sense data are the immediately given contents of sense experience, such as colored patches and shapes, which, according to some epistemologists, serve as cues to the presence and nature of perceived objects.

Tautology: In contemporary logic, a statement that is necessarily true because of its logical form, for example, “White cats are white.” A tautology imparts no new knowledge.

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Philosophies, Theologies, and Methodologies

Empiricism: A theory of knowledge that claims that all knowledge begins with sense experience.

Evidentialism: This term and its cognates evidential and evidentialist are used in three distinct ways in this course. It may refer (1) a broad class or family of apologetics schools that includes classical apologetics, evidential apologetics, and cumulative case apologetics—all of which are related in part because of a similar stance on the relationship between faith and reason; (2) a particular apologetic methodology that focuses primarily on historical evidences in constructing an argument for Christianity ; or (3) an epistemological theory that claims that it is irrational to believe any proposition without sufficient evidence (i.e., archenemy of reformed epistemology).

Existentialism: An attitude and outlook in philosophy, theology, and the arts that stresses the human predicament or human feelings of anxiety, and emphasizes human existence and the qualities distinctive of individuals rather than humanity in the abstract or nature and the world in general.

Fideism: The fideist claims that human beings are inherently religious. If they do not worship God, then they worship false gods—themselves, or things of their own making. On this view a human being is never religiously neutral; he is always either a faithful servant or a rebel against the Creator. It is impossible for the unbeliever as an unbeliever to reflect on the reasonableness of a religious belief and thereby become a belief. Rather, the unbelievers’ only hope is first to believe and then perhaps come to see the reasonableness of the belief.

Foundationalism: An epistemological theory that claims that knowledge is ultimately based on certain foundational beliefs that are acquired and known independently of other beliefs. That is, these foundational or “basic” beliefs are acquired directly or immediately from experience (or in some cases, reason). Classical Foundationalism is a particular theory for distinguishing such basic beliefs from nonbasic beliefs (i.e., beliefs that are derived from other beliefs). Classical foundationalism says that a belief is basic if and only if it is either self-evident, incorrigible, or evident to the senses.

Idealism: The view that asserts that reality consists of or is closely related to ideas, thought, mind, or selves rather than matter; there are many types of idealism

Fundamentalism: In religions, conservative views that include literal interpretations of scriptures as revealing God’s truths—and so yielding a fixed set of beliefs for all time.

Liberalism: As a modern Christian movement, a social and political outlook favoring freedom of the individual and rational consent of human beings, as opposed to an authoritarian ideal. As an approach to the Bible, the critical and analytical study of biblical literature with the purpose of distinguishing among myths, legends, history, and other literary forms.

Materialism: In its extreme form, the view that nothing real except matter. Mind and consciousness are merely manifestations of such matter and are reducible to the physical elements.

Naturalism: The worldview that claims that the natural, physical world is all that exists; synonymous with atheism.

Natural Theology: A term that primarily refers to knowledge of God acquired without the aid of special revelation but derived instead from God’s self-revelation in nature. The term is also used to designate the formal process of discovering and explaining the content of natural revelation. As one can be described as “doing” theology, one can also “do” natural theology. Natural theology is closely associated with the construction of theistic arguments. (Five Views on Apologetics)

• Natural Theology: The attempt to determine the truth of theism without assuming the standpoint of a particular religion (Philosophy of Religion: thinking about faith, p.38)

• Neutralism is the belief that one can adopt a neutral position when considering the world. The neutralist believes that our critical thinking will only be likely to help us toward the truth if it is completely impartial and unbiased. The other extreme of this position is known as fideism.

Phenomenology: A school of thought of which Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) was a leader. It starts with the human subject and his or her consciousness, the experiencing knower; the knowledge we have is limited to things as they are accessible to human consciousness.

Rationalism: A theory of knowledge that holds that all knowledge is acquired or verified through reason. Or the view that the mind has the power to some truths that are logically prior to experience and yet not analytic

Realists (Realism): The view that the objects of our senses exist independently of their being known or related to the mind.

Revealed Theology: Theology that emphasizes revelation as the basis for our knowledge of God.

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Concepts of God

Deism: a variation of theism, but the deist believes that this God cannot or does not involve himself in his creation.

Dualism: A variation of polytheism, the dualist holds to a plurality of only two gods who are opposed to each other. (Usually one god is seen as good and the other as evil.)

Henotheism: recognizes a plurality of gods like polytheism, but restricts his allegiance to one god.

Polytheism: the belief that there exists a plurality of personal gods. This concept is common among primitive people and is clearly present in Greek and Nordic mythology.

Monotheism: often abbreviated as theism, holds that only one God exists. God is seen as a personal being, supreme in power, knowledge and moral worth, who created all other existing beings out of nothing.

Pantheism: often associate with Hinduism and other Eastern religions but not uncommon in the West, holds that it is not ultimately proper to think of God as a personal being of any kind. God must be understood as identical with nature or the universe as a whole.

Panentheism: God is not identical with the universe but must be seen as including the universe. The universe is in some sense God, but God is more than the universe.

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Apologetic Approaches

Classical apologetics: The classical apologetical tradition, as the term classical suggests, is the dominant approach to apologetics in church history, especially prior to the modern period. It emphasizes the presentation of Christianity as rational—as logically coherent and supportable by sound arguments—and offers what its advocates consider proofs of various types (though especially philosophical proofs) for the existence of God as a first step in defending the truth claims of the Christian faith.

Cumulative case: "The term cumulative case is used by apologists in ways different than we are using it in this context, but Basil Mitchell, an early proponent of this view, gave this method that name, and so we will use it here. The careful reader will no doubt note that this method belongs to the same broad family of methods as does the evidential (and perhaps classical) method. However, it will also be apparent that as an argumentative strategy, the cumulative case method has something distinctive to offer. Indeed, this approach to apologetics arose because of the dissatisfaction that some philosophers had with these other evidential-type methods (i.e., the first two of the Big Four)."

Evidential apologetics or evidentialism (not to be confused with epistemological evidentialism) is an approach to Christian apologetics emphasizing the use of evidence to demonstrate that God probably exists. The evidence is supposed to be evidence both the believer and nonbeliever share, that is to say you need not presuppose God's existence

Presuppositionalism: In Christian theology, presuppositionalism is a school of apologetics that aims to present a rational basis for the Christian faith and defend it against objections primarily by exposing the perceived flaws of other worldviews while the Bible, as divine revelation, is presupposed. It claims that apart from presuppositions, one could not make sense of any human experience, and there can be no set of neutral assumptions from which to reason with a non-Christian.[1] In other words, presuppositionalists claim that a Christian cannot consistently declare his belief in the necessary existence of the God of the Bible and simultaneously argue on the basis of a different set of assumptions that God may not exist and Biblical revelation may not be true. Presuppositionalism is the predominant apologetic of Calvinism and the Reformed churches.[2] Two schools of presuppositionalism exist, based on the different teachings of Cornelius Van Til and Gordon Haddon Clark. Presuppositionalism itself contrasts with classical apologetics and evidential apologetics.

Reformed epistemology: is the title given to a broad body of epistemological viewpoints relating to God's existence that have been offered by a group of Protestant Christian philosophers that includes Alvin Plantinga, William Alston, and Nicholas Wolterstorff among others. Rather than a body of arguments, reformed epistemology refers to the epistemological stance that belief in God is a properly basic belief, and therefore no argument for God's existence is necessary. Since this view represents a continuation of the thinking about the relationship between faith and reason found in the 16th century Reformers, particularly John Calvin, it is titled Reformed epistemology.