“Van Til and Transcendental Argument Revisited” by Don Collett

The phrase ‘cognitive dissonance’ first fell upon my ears in the fall of 1994 while enrolled in Professor John Frame’s course on “The Christian Mind,” the first in a series of three courses in Christian apologetics required for Master of Divinity students at Westminster Seminary in California. According to conventional philosophical wisdom, when philosophers run headlong into this sort of dissonance in the course of constructing arguments, they typically seek to overcome it, either by making a distinction or by defining a new term. Following in the footsteps of his apologetics mentor, Cornelius Van Til, Professor Frame added yet a third option, namely, humbly acquiescing in the possibility that such dissonance may in fact constitute a philosophical testimony to the truth of the ‘Creator-creature distinction’ and the Christian concept of mystery it entails. Not all forms of cognitive dissonance were to be regarded, therefore, as something analogous to a ‘charley-horse between the ears’ capable of being massaged away by the powers of reason and the tools of philosophical logic. …